Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
The Whitman County Public Works Department has been awarded a new $660,000 grant to reduce fatalities and serious injury accidents on rural two-lane highways.
The Federal Highway Administration grant will allow Public Works to create a systemic county road safety plan, which will begin with a radar study of all roads and surrounding terrain.
“Two-lane rural highways have had the highest incidents of fatalities and serious-injury accidents,” said Mark Storey, Whitman County Public Works Director. “Most often, we take a spot where there was a serious accident and fix that spot. That would be a spot improvement. But an accident isn’t likely to happen in the exact same place.”
What this grant aims to do is to look at the risk factors in the same type of locations where an accident or accidents have occurred.
Resulting improvements could range from added signs on curves, removal of trees, addition of guardrails and adjusting the slope of a road’s edge so an errant car is less likely to roll.
“Basically, a safety plan for the paved portion of the county road system,” said Storey.
Last summer, Storey and Assistant County Engineer Dean Cornelison wrote a proposal for WSDOT, seeking the funding, which comes from the 2012 federal highways act called “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century.”
“It talks specifically about a more data-driven approach to safety,” said Storey.
WSDOT’s Local Programs division sought applicants from counties with many rural roads.
Whitman County previously received a $650,000 grant in 2010 for road safety improvements. The money resulted in several projects, including the addition of a turn lane at Pullman Airport Road, solar-powered flashing stop signs in two places on Wawawai Road — where more than one accident had occurred — added guardrails and tree removal along the white edgelines on eight different county roads.
The new grant, however, is more about a broader approach.
Plans will be made to hire a consultant who will use a vehicle-mounted radar system which maps terrain – effectively inventorying all obstacles, slopes, etc. alongside county two-lane roads.
“Things that could cause injuries or fatalities outside the pavement, but inside the right of way,” Storey said.
From there, the data will be entered into a CAD program, which will produce detailed maps.
Storey indicated that engineering consultants who do this kind of work are located in Puget Sound, Wenatchee and Portland, Ore.
Specific costs are not yet known for the project which Storey expects to begin in the spring or summer.
“The bulk of the road work will be done in 2016. Some of it might push into ’17 as well,” Storey said.
Accident rates have fallen statewide and in the county in recent years. On two-lane county roads in Washington in 2008, there were 175 fatalities. In 2012 there were 120.
For Whitman County, in 2008, there were two fatal accidents with four serious injuries while in 2012, there was one fatal accident with three serious injuries.
“It’s kind of hard to be sure of the significance when the numbers are so low,” Storey said.
Nonetheless, he indicated the county numbers are part of the state’s overall decrease.
“Some of that I like to think is due to our activities as far as safety,” said Storey. “Part of why we do what we do is to save lives.”
Perhaps a local example is a 1.5-mile guardrail on Pine-City Malden Road, which was installed by Public Works in fall 2013 and was hit last winter.
“People are gonna go off the road,” Storey said. “They just are. So let’s make that not as traumatic.”
The grant was awarded to Whitman County on Jan. 5.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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