When safety's at the wheel, all else moves to the back seat

We are told that replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct is urgent. But to whom?

Every time I enter the mouth of the concrete worm, I envision what Auric Goldfinger called "a pressing engagement." And yet I use the viaduct when I need it, and every day 110,000 people do the same. It survived the 1965 quake and the 2001 quake and it stands.

Several times I have heard earnest citizens say, "If it's dangerous, why don't they close it now?" Because as risks go, it's not that dangerous. Our viaduct is built better than the one that collapsed in Oakland, and the engineers say it would take a once-in-500-year or maybe even a 2,000-year quake to pancake it. Given that such an event is unlikely in our life spans, and a person who uses the viaduct once a day, both ways, is exposed for perhaps four minutes, those 110,000 odds-defiers may be quite rational.

The earthquake risk of a structure depends partly on how long people occupy it. An engineer explained this to me years ago when Ken Behring, the miscreant who owned the Seattle Seahawks, was hollering that the seating area of the Kingdome would collapse in a 500-year quake. But what was the chance of a 500-year quake during a football game? If people wanted to worry, the engineer said, they should worry about the Public Safety Building, because it was occupied 40 hours a week, or Harborview Medical Center, which is occupied constantly.

Since then Harborview has been propped up and the Public Safety Building knocked down, which is to the good. But Seattle has dozens of 1920s-vintage brick apartment houses that a 2,000-year quake could knock down. Which brings up another thing: We think differently about public hazards than private ones.

Consider the case of the drinking water in the Seattle Public Schools. In five schools, arsenic was found in concentrations between 11 and 18 parts per billion. This exceeded the federal standard of 10, but that standard was new. In the Clinton years it had been 50 parts per billion. Was 18 really dangerous? An expert at the University of Washington told The Seattle Times that fixing the pipes would reduce the lifetime risk of cancer by three one-thousandths of 1 percent. And that was for a schoolkid who guzzled a liter a day for five years.

Politically, there was no argument about it: The pipes had to be replaced. It was arsenic, and in a public school. It was a safety issue, which put education second and pipes first. And yet how many other companies and institutions in Seattle checked their drinking water? How many media people did? I didn't check mine.

All this is prelude to say that replacing the viaduct may not be as urgent as politicians say it is. Like Behring, who was raising the safety issue to break a lease, the supporters of the tunnel and the rebuild all have other agendas. The tunnel, which costs a billion dollars (at least) more than any other option, is really an urban-design project. It adds amenity and property value to downtown living — the drawings are beautiful — but it doesn't add to transportation. It maintains it.

As transportation, the viaduct can be maintained for a few decades and the tunnel-or-rebuild question decided later. The earthquake risk can be reduced by the strategic placement of steel, as was recommended by two retired engineers, Victor Gray and the late Neil Twelker.

The $2.2 billion in hand for the viaduct is mostly from gas taxes, and is supposed to be for transportation. It would benefit transportation much more to spend that money on a wider Highway 520 bridge, or on reworking Interstate 5 into a tollway with congestion pricing to keep traffic flowing 24 hours a day.

Not that that will happen. It won't. Once played, the safety card trumps all the others.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com