Enviro idiocy reaches new heights in Seattle DOT

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web Today picked up this case of environmental idiocy reaching new heights - an unwillingness to use salt on Seattle roads because they don't want to "contaminate" Puget Sound with the runoff.

In a winter in which there has been snow and ice in places which have not seen freezing temperatures for decades, like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, indicating the absurdity of notions of a global warming trend, it has been snowing and icing unusually severely in Seattle WA.

Last Friday a pair of buses slid down the snow-covered cobblestones of a street near the city center, smashing into each other, and careening through a guardrail ending up half hanging over Interstate 5, about 20 to 30 feet above. Sheer luck averted a huge disaster on I-5.

The Seattle Times reported that the city of Seattle left snow and ice on major arterials by design. Alex Wiggins of the Seattle Department of Transportation explained: "We decided not to utilize salt because it's not a healthy addition to Puget Sound."

The northeast and the mid-west would come to a halt for long stretches of each winter and have thousands more fatal accidents each year if salt wasn't liberally applied to roads each winter, despite the fact that it runs off into streams, lakes and rivers without undue damage to their fresh water ecology.

But Puget Sound that the city green in Seattle wants to protect is a saltwater estuary. The City DOT guy wants to protect salt water from salt!

CORRECTION: in our first report we had the buses near the state Capitol but they were on an oddly named Capitol Hill in Seattle. The state Capitol is 100km (60 miles) away in Olympia. Thanks to a reader for the correction.

TOLLROADSnews 2008-12-23