Widening SR 904 is about more than helping football fans

I’ve been thinking about Coral Muscarella lately. I’ve also been thinking about Lorissa Green.

The latter many area residents will remember as the Cheney High School 16-year-old girl killed in a Jan. 17, 2009 collision at what used to be the at-grade intersection of Cheney-Spokane Road and State Route 195. Thanks to the dedicated, focused efforts of her mother, Debbie Hammel, who worked tirelessly to make legislators aware of the dangers, that deadly intersection is no more — replaced by a safer, $11 million interchange/overpass.

Hammel and Green’s story have been recounted many times in the local media. It’s a shame it took such a tragedy for state government to wake up to a need and remedy a problem long known in this region.

Muscarella’s story is not so well known. No champion has emerged for her.

The former Four Lakes resident and Cheney business owner was heading to a bank in Cheney on Jan. 21, 2009 prior to traveling to the Tri-Cities to visit a daughter and grandchild. She never made it, not even to the bank.

About 10:15 a.m., a 1992 Nissan Pathfinder driven by Kimberly Fawn Campbell rear-ended another vehicle along the side of State Route 904 just south of Four Lakes, crossed the centerline and struck Muscarella’s 2007 Honda Pilot virtually head on. Muscarella died at the scene.

I remember it because I was there. Not in the journalist capacity, but as one of several drivers who came upon the scene just as Campbell’s Pathfinder finished rolling to a stop in the field west of the highway.

I was on my way to work, and after parking my car, jumped out and ran up to the scene along with several others to help. I remember approaching the Pilot, only to be met by a woman climbing out of the vehicle telling me she was a nurse and that “There’s nothing we can do for her.”

Coral and her husband Chuck used to own PC Photo Supply in the Cheney Plaza, right where businesses like Froyo are now located. The Cheney Free Press used to take computer and photo work to them, and Coral and I had a little contest.

Back then, mid-2000s, we were still shooting film, and we took our color film to PC Photo Supply for processing. Coral used to try to guess which of the pictures brought in would be the ones I would pick to be featured on our front pages of news and sports.

Back at the accident site in 2009, I began to guess the woman killed was Coral when I saw her lifeless body on the ambulance stretcher, lying on the ground. It wasn’t until I finally got to the office that another reporter confirmed the awful truth.

You can tick off a litany of economic reasons supporting Cheney’s lobbying efforts to get the state Legislature to find the estimated $15 million it would take to widen SR 904 to five lanes. They’d all be good reasons.

For me, as someone who travels the road virtually daily, it comes down to Coral Muscarella. It comes down to the five people who died in another head on collision when I first started here at the Free Press in 2000.

It comes down to others who have been injured on that five-mile stretch of highway, and the countless others who travel it every day, including those in yellow buses, who stand as potential victims. To me, SR 904 between Cheney and Four Lakes is just as dangerous as SR 195 south of Colfax — thousand-pound-plus cars and trucks flying by each other at high speed just a few feet away where one mistake can create a lifetime of pain, if not life’s end.

That’s why it was disappointing to see the SR 904 project fail to make the Senate’s proposed transportation budget’s project list. And it’s also why it was eye-wateringly maddening to hear Cheney Mayor Tom Trulove tell the City Council at their last meeting that the chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee felt the real reason behind the desire to widen SR 904 was to facilitate football fans traveling to and from Eastern Washington home games.

That got me thinking of Coral Muscarella. Yep, it’s a shame people have to die before someone decides to take public safety seriously.

I hope the members of the state House of Representatives take travel on SR 904 seriously, because Coral Muscarella needs a champion.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].