By Charly SHELTON

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System has been stricken from the federal budget for the coming 2018 fiscal year. Despite a request for $16.1 million annually for maintenance and operations reaching the White House in December of last year, the budget has come back without funding for the system, leaving the nearly completed project at a standstill.

“Every year the President submits a new budget and, in the early years of the Obama Administration, there was no funding for ShakeAlert. I introduced amendments in the Appropriations Committee to help fund the project. And for the first couple of years, that’s how the project was funded,” said Representative Adam Schiff, who sponsors the bill which the project is attached to. “Ultimately the Obama Administration came to recognize the value of developing this system, so then they started including it in their own budget in a substantial way. This is now the first budget proposed by President Trump and the project is zeroed out in his budget, which means we’ll have to go back to where we were early in the Obama Administration by including the funding in a bipartisan way through the Appropriations Committee rather than starting out with a request from the President.”

The system was developed by scientists at Caltech, UC-Berkeley, the University of Washington and the University of Oregon, and the technology is proven to be sound. Such an early warning system could be enormously helpful in providing residents and first responders with advance notice that could help save lives, avoid injuries and avert major infrastructure damage by slowing trains to prevent derailment, stopping elevators, pausing surgeries and taking other actions in the event of a major earthquake.

But this misstep could just be growing pains for the new administration. While there is a question to be asked about whether this is part of a broader effort to cut back everything that isn’t defense, taking from domestic discretionary spending to support increases in defense spending, Schiff said he doesn’t believe that the project has been singled out for cancellation as special treatment for ShakeAlert.

“There is still very strong bipartisan support for the project and it would make no sense at all to invest around $25 million to build up the system and then not complete it and operate it,” Schiff said. “So I totally hope and expect that we will be able to once again provide the federal funding in the budget. I would hope that as this administration becomes more familiar with the project, they come to embrace it. I have to hope that this was the result of not doing your homework rather than active opposition because it enjoys such strong bipartisan support.”

The next step for finding new funding will be to take it back to develop more bipartisan support in the House Appropriations Committee so that it becomes part of the House Mark, or the House Bill. Hopefully, this will be similarly matched in the senate and passed through these channels before being signed by the President. For this to work, it will take cooperation from representatives from all along the West Coast. Any members of the public who would like to see this earthquake early warning system in place should spread the word to friends and family to write to their representatives.

“This is going to affect people all up and down the West Coast – California, Washington State and Oregon. So people in any congressional district or who have friends or family in these other western states, [I would] urge them to weigh in with their representatives and make their voices heard,” Schiff said. “The members tend to be very responsive to what they hear from their constituents.”

Schiff added, “Any way you slice it, the system is too important to walk away from at this point.”

  Charly Shelton