Tag Archives: city of seattle

News, Transportation

What’s Your Bid for a 123-Foot Historic Fireboat Named Alki?

(Image: screenshot)

(Via KIRO 7) With eight days of bidding left, and 38 bids, an historic 1927 fireboat is going for an easy $50,000 on eBay. This baby is loaded, but be warned — the buyer is responsible for picking it up.

Bidadoo Auctions has just this one fireboat on sale, and sadly their trailers seem to top out at 16 feet, so it seems as if bidders will want to be seafaring.

Still, let’s take a look at what you get. History, for one. The Alki was (is!) the City of Seattle’s third fireboat. Born in an Oakland shipyard in 1927, its 123-foot length (26 on the beam)  led to it being billed as the largest fireboat you could get. It weighs in at a svelte 196 tons, with nine feet of draft. So not really for the Everglades, but certainly lake-worthy.

These days it’s diesel-powered (two supercharged GM 500 HP, 8-cylinder engines, 66 years young) — carrying over 8,000 gallons of fuel, so no worries about longer weekend trips — and can pump 16,200 gallons per minute at 120 PSI. Your kids will love that on a hot summer day, you kidding me? You bet they will.

Radar? Check. Depth sounder, check. VHF radio? All the very high frequencies, my friend. And kick that riveted steel hull if you want. This baby can take it. That’s made in America, buddy. Fog nozzle? I don’t even know that that is, but by god, it’s got it!

A couple of things, just a formality, really — the city wants to make sure you are a “responsible” buyer, so you’ll need to show proof of insurance — Ha ha! Can’t you just imagine the gecko standing on deck? — and moorage. We’ve…uh…we’ve had trouble with moorage in the past.

Two last things: the Alki is being sold “as is.” And, yes, Bidadoo does accept PayPal.

News, Weather

SnowWatch Joins RainWatch and WindWatch in New All-Weather League

A 2010 snow storm that developed during the day caught the city by surprise. (Photo: MvB)

Having just visited the University of Washington/City of Seattle project SnowWatch, I can tell you that we’re not expecting snow for the next 24 hours. Combined with RainWatch and WindWatch, you now have some extremely granular real-time weather data at your fingertips. (Look for 30-50 mph gusts out on the Sound tomorrow afternoon.)

Led by Jeff Baars and Cliff Mass, SnowWatch builds on work already done for RainWatch, which was to place rain gauges all around the greater metro area. The Camano Island radar station is fine at seeing rain over Seattle, but it’s not always accurate in estimations of rainfall, for a number of reasons which UW atmospheric sciences students are eager to elucidate for you if you ask.

Combining the rain gauges with radar lets the models recalibrate with on-the-ground data. For SnowWatch purposes, the measurements are of both air and ground temperatures, both of which make a big difference in whether there’s snow, and whether it sticks.

Someone out there is thinking, @!$# city! I can tell when it’s raining. That’s true, I imagine. But can you tell precisely where it’s raining and in what amounts, during sudden storms that can provoke flash floods once storm sewers are overwhelmed? Can you direct emergency services to the right neighborhoods as the storm moves through?

Explains the Seattle Times:

Mass proposed RainWatch after the deadly Madison Valley floods of December 2006, when a woman drowned in her basement from a surge of floodwater. As a result of the storm, more than 300 claims were filed against the city, which paid out $3.2 million.

Each of these meteorological projects will alert city officials via email when conditions turn threatening. An hour or two of advance notice before things get really bad can make a huge difference. Now that there’s less likelihood of a major storm sneaking up on us from the coast, thanks to the coastal radar installation, the question is how to deal with what we know is coming once it gets here. Being able to send the city’s limited resources to where they are needed most should be a huge help.

News, Transportation

Crosstown Transit? Seattle Wins Federal Funds for Study

Hey, since we're just spitballing, here... (Photo: MvB)

Mayor McGinn got an out-of-town boost this week, when the Federal Transit Administration announced the City of Seattle won a $900,000 grant to study a high capacity transit in downtown Seattle. (Also, Sound Transit netted $5.4 million to “replace buses in its Seattle-area fleet that are beyond their useful lives with hybrid-diesel buses.”)

Explains the FTA:

The study will examine the benefits, costs, and impacts of implementing an urban circulator in the corridor between the Lower Queen Anne, Uptown, and South Lake Union neighborhoods to the north, and the King Street Station and International District Multimodal Hub on the south end of downtown. […] The current Seattle Transit Master Plan estimates that the Connector project could generate approximately 10,000 new transit riders in Seattle Center City by 2030.

The high-capacity transit corridor would better connect neighborhoods with each other, and  could also link the King Street and International District Stations, Colman Dock, and Westlake Center.

To the McGinn administration, “circulator” is synonymous with “a rapid streetcar,” which is an idea the Mayor has been trying to talk the Council into throwing money at. Notes Publicola: “The city council has long been cool to the idea of westside Seattle rail, noting that it’s far more expensive than other options such as bus rapid transit.”

Properly done, BRT is a fast way to reach high capacity, though you eventually top out in the number of passengers you can carry, compared to the ability of rail to simply add another coach. Longer term, rail’s carrying capacity might exceed BRT’s by as much as 100 percent, assuming those passengers eventually show up. But BRT has to be correctly implemented, or it amounts simply to more buses creeping down already crowded roads.

Consider the SLU streetcar a kind of pilot project: With the new Amazon campus open in South Lake Union, the streetcar “carried 2,681 people per weekday in September,” reports the Seattle Times. While early ridership was projected at 1,000 trips a day, it was thought that might triple by 2020. Now you see fewer stories about how far away 3,000 trips a day seems.

McGinn would like to see $1.5 million in the 2012 city budget for a major streetcar network study, and getting $900,000 helps prime the public opinion pump. Thus spake he: “Combined with rail planning money I have proposed in the 2012 budget and funding from other sources, this brings us closer to expanding our streetcar network and giving people better transportation choices.”

Congressman Jim McDermott stayed out of the modality wars:  “This will put Seattle in a better position to compete for transit dollars, and the family-wage construction jobs that will come with them when Congress passes the American Jobs Act.”