By Doug Macdonald published in Post Alley
Ed note: A good friend and colleague of Tom’s has written more of his story and sent this along to Skyline. What a marvelous legacy he has left.
Do we all understand that a community is only as livable today and sustainable tomorrow as the quality of its infrastructure underpinnings? If we do, to find Tom Gibbs’s obituary in the SeattleTimes this week is to draw us back to the people – Tom Gibbs was a skilled, tireless, visionary and innovative leader among them – and the time that gave Seattle much of the foundation on which our community thrives today.
In the 1980s and 1990s, I knew Tom and more than a little of his story. Not personally, but by reputation and from far afield in Boston where I worked as Boston came late to charting its own course, largely based on King County Metro’s example, to fix the wastewater pollution crisis fouling Boston Harbor. Tom over the course of his career, well annotated in the Seattle Times obituary, built not just wastewater infrastructure, but ran what is now the Metro bus system and helped build what is now T-Mobile Park. But for me, Gibbs was always first and foremost a titan of environmental wastewater engineering and program delivery whose achievement was the rescue of Lake Washington, the Duwamish River, and Elliott Bay. Maybe it’s because sewer/wastewater careerists don’t see much of the limelight that, within that unlit world, we have no difficulty recognizing our heroes.