By Charly SHELTON

There are growing pains with every new endeavor in Washington, but the Earthquake Early Warning System has had more than its share. The project was cut from the federal budget once again by the Trump administration, but Representative Adam Schiff is a firm believer in its future.

“It’s really penny wise, pound foolish not to invest in a system like this, and the primary reason is that it will save lives,” Rep. Schiff said.

Earthquakes cannot be forecast, but they move slower than electricity and that can make the difference. The Earthquake Early Warning System is a network of seismometers and monitoring stations placed along known faults which track ground movement and, when triggered by an earthquake, can send out an alert to affected areas along the west coast. Depending on proximity to the epicenter, it may be a few seconds warning – enough time to stop a surgery, shut down heavy machinery or gas lines, or even just get to a safe place before the shaking starts – but farther out locations can receive up to a minute’s notice.

“Funding was not included in the present budget and this is not the first time that’s happened,” Rep. Schiff said. “Early on, when we were getting this project underway, it wasn’t included in the Obama administration budget either and we added it into the budget on a bipartisan basis. As the project began to be built out, the Obama administration came to support it strongly and included it in its annual budget. We are now only about $7-8 million short of building out the system, and it is a system that costs overall about $30-$35 million. So we’re a long way towards building it out.”

The next step for the system will be to seek bipartisan funding once again to circumvent the current suggested budget, and hopefully the current administration will come to see the value of the system, Rep. Schiff said.

“I would certainly hope that they would come to recognize the value of this. This administration doesn’t have a particularly soft spot for California [and] I hope that it is not playing a role here … but either way we’re committed to doing this,” Rep. Schiff said. “[So] the next step is for Congress to put the funding in its own budget, in its own appropriation bills. The administration zeroed out [the system] in its budget, but its budget is really just a proposal for what should be funded and what shouldn’t. Then Congress takes that and does with with it as it will. And in the past, when the administration hasn’t included it, Congress has put it in nonetheless. That is our expectation of what should happen here.”

  Charly Shelton