Seattlest Inspected the Viaduct

Seattlest got our first chance to stick our fingers in the Viaduct's wounds this weekend courtesy of a WSDOT walking tour. Unless you're the type to sign up for a St Patrick's Day 15,000 K fun run or something like that opportunities to walk around on the Viaduct's road bed are few and far between, so this tour was greatly appreciated. On Saturday morning we met at the 1st and Columbia onramp to collect our hard hat, safety vest and donuts. Maybe ten or fifteen of us formed a group and WSDOT guy Ali Amiri marched us out onto the roadway. When we took Ali's picture he said, "Oh, no. This isn't for some website is it?" The world can read Seattlest like a book.

Once the tour we got underway we quickly got the impression that WSDOT was not all that pleased with the recent Viaduct vote: "Look, we'll do what we can in the meantime, but this thing is going to fall on your heads if you don't allow us to take it down soon." No one actually said that, but that seemed to be the long and short of it. "See this column you're standing next to? Number 94? It's sinking. We're 48 hours from knowing if we have to take emergency measures to stop if from sinking any farther into this bog it's built on, because if it doesn't stop on its own it's going to fuck everything up. Look up. See those wet spots up there? That's water seeping through the roadway, of course passing around and through rebar on its way. Not good. See that crack over there? We're bracing it so that the roadway doesn't shear away from the support column." The fact that the best time to scare the crap out of someone about the dangers of the Viaduct is when they're standing on it is not lost on WSDOT.

They also spent a good deal of time explaining to us what they're doing right now. They're moving some electrical stations out from under the Viaduct. It's going down, they seem to be saying, why take out power to half of downtown when it happens? They're working on some upgrades to the Battery Street tunnel and the elevated portions of the roadway near the tunnel are built on decent soil so they're working on reinforcing those areas and there's some more work planned for the south end of the Viaduct. It's all stuff that will need to be done regardless of what form the main stretch takes. Most of the WSDOT talking points still include a potential tunnel, by the way. They're aware of an amount of local support for a surface-grade boulevard, but they don't see it as workable due to current and projected traffic patterns.