The following editorial appeared Friday in the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin.

News of the Snoqualmie Pass rockslide that killed three women on Interstate 90 … sent chills down the spines of the people of Eastern Washington - and left a question swirling in our minds.

Is it safe to cross the Cascade Mountains?

Well, it’s clearly not as safe as we had believed.

A great many Eastern Washington residents make the trip to the Seattle area several times a year. And most of us have never even considered the possibility that huge boulders from the cliffs, created when the highway was cut through the mountains, could come crashing down on a car.

Yet, that’s what happened early Sunday morning (Sept. 11). A boulder 5 feet in diameter landed on a Volvo heading west on I-90, killing the three women inside.

But while most of us never considered the possibility of rockslide, state officials have. It’s been studied for years.

The site of the rockslide Sunday had been considered a low risk. The Department of Transportation rated 2,500 unstable slopes in the 1990s as part of a program to identify and address slopes that could cause problems, according to The Seattle Times. Slopes were rated on a scale of from least dangerous (33) to most dangerous (891). Sunday’s slide area was scored just 273..

The current two-year budget to improve unstable slopes is less than $13 million, the Times reported. DOT officials estimate it would cost about $100 million to address all the unstable slopes with scores of 350 or more. That means that even if the state did put all those resources into slide prevention, the area that failed Sunday would not have been addressed.

The weekend tragedy was an accident — a tragic accident.

Still, it should serve as a reminder that more attention needs to be focused on potential slide areas.

But it would be a mistake to overreact and put so much money into slide prevention that other transportation needs suffer.

But the current $13 million budget for fixing unstable slopes is half of what it was in the two previous two-year budgets. Slope repair has been given a lower priority in state spending.

The areas deemed to be the most dangerous need attention sooner rather than later. Thankfully, the state has already identified those areas so action can be taken.