Lawmakers’ neglect of school seismic safety risks children’s lives

The 2022 Legislative session started this week with nearly a billion dollars of surplus revenue. It’s no surprise the money is burning a hole in Olympia’s pocket. It seems everyone in town has a pet project. But not one addresses the earthquake threat facing thousands of children attending older, unsafe public schools throughout Washington.

On June 30, the state Department of Natural Resources released the School Seismic Safety Project 2019-2021. This report summarizes the earthquake risk at 561 school buildings (274 schools at 245 campuses) across the state.

The study concluded that 93% of the school buildings examined rated a one-star (low) grade on a five-star grading scale. In plain English, that means the state knows all or part of at least 540 school buildings are likely to collapse during a design-level earthquake leading to death, injury and entrapment of students and staff. That doesn’t address the safety of people in the other 3,900 buildings not included in the study.

DNR’s Washington Geological Survey and the Reid Middleton Consultants completed the study ordered by the Legislature. The study ignores the human cost of a quake and focuses on the dollars a theoretical earthquake event may cost, along with the costs for seismic retrofit and building replacement costs, and rosy capital budget-speak about what a great job the Washington Legislature has done so far to address earthquake effects on schools. The study’s priorities focus on the inconvenience of “negative economic impacts” rather than sounding the alarm about the risks of death and injury to school staff and students. A quake at the right time and place that hit Puget Sound could kill or injure several thousand children and cost billions to repair the schools. That is inconvenient.

Oregon, British Columbia and California have spent billions of dollars and years hardening their education infrastructure against earthquakes. Not so here in Washington.

Washington has spent less than $50 million since 2017. It may cost as much as $4 billion to $5 billion over the next 15 years to address the problem. There is enough money if children’s life-safety becomes the priority for funding. That means parents will have to fight special interests for $250 million per year for 10 to 15 years to fix unsafe schools. Everybody in Olympia wants their slice of the pie, and legislators for too long have been willing to ignore a known public safety risk (as long as they feel their kids are safe.)

Few major policy decisions occur during a 60-day session, but six measures could set the stage for 2023:

∙ Continue the Seismic School Safety Project and make the results public.

∙ Explore FEMA funding through its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program for hazard mitigation.

∙ All school modernization projects must include seismic upgrades.

∙ Agree that all schools in tsunami zones must be moved to higher ground.

∙ Provide sufficient funding to improve cost estimates for seismic retrofit.

∙ Most important, create a Joint House-Senate committee to address school seismic safety.

Legislators have little engineering or earth science knowledge. We need educated policy makers to draft legislation before 2023. That won’t happen in a few 90-minute hearings. It takes multiple in-depth work sessions.

In a state where it is illegal for your children to get in a boat without a life jacket or sit in a car without a seat belt and a child seat, you are by law required to take them to a school that may fall on them in an earthquake. This life-threatening risk has not been addressed by elected officials because families have not demanded action. It’s time for parents to demand Olympia remember our kids.