Road stripes won't avert a tragedy

Aug. 19, 2007

Opinion: John R. Moses

The state highway department must take off the brakes and install some real safety features near the temporary Su Valley Jr./Sr. High campus at Mile 98 of the Parks Highway. The safe buildings installed there to replace a burned campus are vital, but someone is liable to be seriously hurt or killed trying to get to them over the next two years unless more improvements are made on that busy patch of highway before the weather turns.

The Mat-Su Borough School District and Borough management have each done a great job getting the school up and running following the June fire that destroyed the school and most of its supplies and files. Everyone in the Mat-Su community involved with the project deserves praise - especially Upper Susitna Senior and Community Center members who offered their land as a temporary campus. They displaced their center's programs for the good of the area's youth.

Now it's time to address some vital highway traffic safety issues the state should have moved on as quickly as local officials and the nonprofit center worked to make the temporary campus a reality.

The entrance to the temporary campus is an accident waiting to happen without appropriate caution lights and a formal 45 mph speed zone near Mile 98 of the Parks Highway. Any accident that happens with a school bus or other vehicle getting rear-ended or T-boned by highway traffic while attempting to enter or leave the campus won't be the result of some unforeseeable tragedy that couldn't have been mitigated or avoided. The state has already been warned by the Su Valley community.

In other words, the state Department of Transportation might want to dust off its checkbook and call its underwriters, because the potential for lawsuits will grow with each day proper signage, speed zones, gravel, off-highway turn lanes and flashing caution lights do not appear.

School officials and parents were happy when a Department of Transportation employee came to the campus last week to plan a new middle-of-the-highway left turn lane and assess the situation. Su Valley's parents and staff weren't all happy with what they heard from the state that day. Turn lanes, no problem. But as for other solutions, those will take some time.

Creating turn lanes isn't enough, nor is the yellow &#8220advisory” sign there now telling motorists to slow down (if they feel like it) to 45 mph to accommodate turning traffic ahead north of Mile 98.

Su Valley principal Matt Clark, who has worked tirelessly since the night the old campus burned down to get a new campus going, said a highway department employee told school representatives flat out that a 45 mph zone outside the school would be unenforceable. There is already a 55 mph speed zone there.

A 45 mph speed zone for the school could easily be enforced. Troopers not long ago were whipping around downtown Talkeetna one recent Friday night on every motorized method of conveyance they owned giving out tickets for no seatbelts and such, checking registrations and even stopping people for exceeding a 45 mph zone on the way into the village. They should have no problem on the open highway 14 miles away protecting the safety of that school's population by enforcing a safety zone in an area where troopers don't need to hide patrol vehicles between trees to get results.

Many in the Upper Susitna Valley have had a bad enough time of it recently. One year ago this week there were devastating floods. The emergency center some of those flood victims stayed in was Su Valley High, which burned June 5. The community lost a well-respected healer to a vehicle crash about five miles down the road from the Su Valley campus not long after the fire.

The traffic improvements installed at this site are not a waste of cash. They will serve to make things better for the seniors and those attending events at the popular gathering hall there once the campus moves back across the street in two years to its permanent home. Flashing lights have been needed there for years, anyway. Plenty of kids walk to school, even in lousy weather when visibility is low. The state must not wait for something bad to happen before it acts to create a safer situation near Mile 98 for all Parks Highway users.