Recent Stories with tag replacement

In a Crosscut story on Mayor McGinn's surprise seawall announcement last week, former mayor Charles Royer said, "I believe him when he says it is a security and safety issue, because that is what the engineers were telling me in 1985." A 2003 civil engineering paper backs Royer up, saying that the need for a new seawall has been known "for twenty years."

But since the Nisqually earthquake in 2001, seawall repair was moved from the back burner, if not exactly to the front burner. In the November 8, 1934, Engineering News Record, which looked into construction of the first seawall, several challenges were detailed: "the high cost entailed by the physical problems of soft bottom, and a 16-ft tide range, with the attendant marine-borer menace to timber construction." These naturally resurfaced with the prospect of repair.

But then as now, you can't engineer politics. So nine years later, when the Mayor suggests moving seawall construction up by two years, you can read this response on City Council member's Tim Burgess's blog: "Elliott Bay Seawall: Questions to Ponder." What you will learn is that nine years after city leadership was confronted with a significant chance of catastrophic failure of the seawall:

• We don't know what it will cost or look like,
• don't know who will pay for it,
• and don't have a construction process mapped out....
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(Thanks to West Seattle Blog for sharing their video.)

Saying public safety demands it, Mayor Mike McGinn announced yesterday that he intends to speed up replacement of the seawall, and will use a ballot measure to ask for a $250 million 30-year bond. The bond would increase property taxes by 12 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value.

Over half of the seawall that holds back Alaskan Way is compromised, and the rest of it is not in confidence-inspiring condition either: a section of sidewalk collapsed in May 2009, trapping a man.

The seawall was built over time between 1916 and 1936 so that freight could get right to the piers for loading and unloading. Gribble-infested timber platforms act as--less and less--as an anchor for the steel and concrete atop them. Another timber platform, buried thirteen feet deep and about sixty feet wide, holds the fill dirt and material that was dumped to create a level surface. Any significant earthquake would cause the seawall to fail catastrophically, and likely bring down the Viaduct with it.

In fact, it is probably not a good idea to have crowds of people jump up and down on it at the same time. Yet, as with the Viaduct itself, the danger to public safety it represents has not resulted in much nonverbal action. At the outset, it seemed to make sense that the seawall, which was in worse condition than the sagging Viaduct, could be replaced along with the Viaduct, in a year or two....

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