My Facebook friends were agog on Friday afternoon as news of the North Fire that briefly closed I-15 in the Cajon Pass spread across the country.
“So right now in California, a wildfire has jumped I-15 and there are cars and trucks on fire,” an attorney friend in Virginia posted on his timeline. “I've driven in near blizzards on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, near hurricane force winds on I-95, and driving rain. I don't know what the hell I would do if this happened to me.”
I imagine he would do what everyone else did who got caught in the path of the flames: run. In all, 18 cars and two big rigs burned. Another 80 or so vehicles were abandoned as drivers fled the fast moving flames.
Driving up the I-15 on a Friday night is never fun. Last Friday would have been bad enough, as Caltrans that morning had introduced a new traffic pattern to accommodate ongoing construction around the I-215 interchange. But, for several hours, a disaster shut down the main highway between Southern California and Las Vegas.
The weekend brought monsoon rains, which was a relief for firefighters battling the blaze that had grown to around 6,000 acres – and grief for drivers across Southern California.
Particularly grievous was the trip of the guy who found himself surrounded by flood waters rushing down Tex Wash when a sinkhole opened beneath the Adair Overcrossing about 50 miles east of the Arizona border. One little bridge washes out, and suddenly the main artery between L.A. and Phoenix is cut off for weeks, with full repairs likely requiring several months.
Catastrophes occasionally become necessary to concentrate the public's attention, if only for a moment, on things we take for granted. Like intact infrastructure, for example, or roads unmolested by fire and floodwater.
Everyone knows that California's roads and bridges are a disaster. I was writing about Inland SoCal's road woes a decade ago when I toiled in anonymity as a full-time editorial writer for this newspaper. The news isn't exactly new.
Nor are the proposed solutions – more taxes, more bonds, more public transit. Only the numbers and the players change. Caltrans has a $59 billion maintenance backlog. County and city governments' deferred maintenance accounts for another $78 billion. And those figures grow every year.
Obviously, taxpayers and motorists are going to pay. Legislators are ever enamored with raising the gas tax, which has sat untouched since 1994. State Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, introduced a bill recently to raise the tax by 10 cents a gallon.
No thanks. The gas tax is high enough at 18 cents a gallon. And please, no more bonds that include billions of dollars to pay for deferred maintenance. One idea floating around is to charge drivers a $52 annual road maintenance fee. I could go for that, especially if Caltrans cut superfluous positions and legislators could guarantee they wouldn't raid the funds for other projects. Could they?
Here's a thought: The state has been at its most effective at building and repairing roads when it outsourced work to private sector firms and offered financial incentives to finish the work quickly, safely and on budget.
When the 1994 Northridge Earthquake collapsed large sections of I-10 in Los Angeles, Gov. Pete Wilson used his emergency powers to waive environmental and contracting rules to get the freeway reopened in less than three months. The contractor finished 74 days early with the promise of a $200,000 a day bonus for every day the work was done ahead of schedule.
Gov. Jerry Brown did something similar in 2011, when a fuel tanker truck exploded beneath the Paramount Boulevard overpass in the Los Angeles suburb of Montebello. The bridge was demolished and rebuilt in three months.
Three months seems to be a magic number. Could construction crews be challenged to beat that record out in Desert Center?
One final thought: Our roads aren't exactly built to handle major disasters. But most people aren't equipped to handle disasters, either.
Imagine yourself among motorists stuck on I-15 in a wildfire, or on I-10 during a flood. We'll need to spend billions to get our highways and bridges up to par. Why not spend a few hours and $100 preparing yourself for an emergency before the next one strikes?
This piece originally appeared in The Press Enterprise