This day in history: Spokane’s transit system was in an ‘insidious’ financial crisis

From 1975: Worried city officials watched “helplessly” and were “seemingly powerless” to solve the Spokane Transit System’s financial crisis.

The Spokesman-Review reported that the transit system’s “deficits keep piling up year after year, like some insidious cancerous growth.”

The deficits were expected to be $743,000 for 1975 and projected to be over $1 million in 1976. It had become a “devastating drain on the city’s much-battered budget.”

How could the city keep the buses running? That was the question put to the city’s finance director.

He could only say that it would be necessary to raise fares, cut back service, and plead for more state and federal funding.

From 1925: A mysterious blast in the Manito Park area rattled windows and shook beds in a mile-wide swath of the South Hill.

Police could offer no explanation other than it might have been connected with a “hole in the asphalt paving that would admit the crown of a hat” on East Sixteenth Avenue.

Some people suggested that it could have been “the arrival of a meteor.” Others suspected that someone’s hot water tank “had gone on a rampage.”

Police thought it more likely that gunpowder was discharged by “someone with a crude sense of humor.”

Also on this day

(From onthisday.com)

1781: 9,000 American and 7,000 French troops begin the Siege of Yorktown.

1887: Yellow River or Huáng Hé floods in China, killing between 900,000 and 2 million people, one of the deadliest natural disasters in history.