Category: Street-Smart Naturalist Blog

The WSDOT finally fessed up that an abandoned pipe casing is the culprit choking its beloved Bertha. Turns out that contractors were supposed to know that the 8-inch diameter, 119-foot-long well casing was there. Furthermore, the pipe had been placed as part of a study to measure groundwater during research for the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project.

WSDOT officials stated on Friday that they had hit the pipe on December 3, when Bertha pushed it six to seven feet out of the ground. Workers then pulled up a 55-foot long piece of the pipe, apparently thinking that they had gotten out the entire thing. According to spokesperson Chris Dixon, when Bertha then started to chew up a boulder, it gave them “a false sense of security.”

Several issues stand out about this story. As someone focused on Seattle’s history, I thoroughly enjoyed so many people taking such an interest in the buried stories of our city’s past. I can only hope that people will continue to want to learn more of these stories. As a geologist, I also enjoyed the focus on Seattle’s geologic past, Plus anything that can get more people to say “glacial erratic” is fine by me.

More disturbing though, is the reticence of WSDOT on the pipe casing. In the week after the initial stoppage, a buddy of mine had told me the exact story that WSDOT is now telling. Why didn’t they just tell us immediately? Their excuses now just seem to be self-serving, a particularly bad precedent for an agency known for making a few huge errors. I recognize that they might not have been able to do anything, and all of the fun speculation would not have occurred, but it seems that being truthful certainly wouldn’t hurt WSDOT.

One positive aspect of the pipe story is that as the drill progresses, it will move completely away (at least it is supposed to) from any area where human-created objects could block Bertha. That does not mean that there won’t be any erratics, or other glacially deposited boulders, to get in the way, but at least Bertha was designed to cut through them.

I suspect though that this won’t be the last time Bertha will be in the news.

 

“As a result of its rugged topography, the city of Seattle has a class of engineering problems peculiarly its own,” wrote George Holmes Moore. He, of course, was referring to the desires of Seattle citizens to travel more easily through the city. The only solution was to move massive amounts of dirt out of the way and create better access. Holmes’ sentence was written in March 1910. He was referring to what until Bertha bit it, or couldn’t, was Seattle’s most famous digging scheme, the regrading of Denny Hill.

As with Bertha, the removal of Denny Hill at the north end of downtown Seattle was big news across the country. The reports describe the blasting away of 5.5 million cubic yards of dirt as a beautiful thing, necessary to the survival of the city. As H. Cole Estep wrote in Industrial Magazine, “This is a tremendous task for a community so young in years; but the citizens, having an abiding faith that Seattle is destined to become the New York of the Pacific coast, have taxed themselves cheerfully and heavily in order to finance the undertaking.” Sound familiar? All we need to do is a bit of landscape rejiggering and Seattle will be a world class city. It didn’t happen then.

Most citizens did not actually tax themselves. Only those affected by regrade projects had to pay. They did so through what were known as Local Improvement Districts, where those who owned land in the regrade area paid for the project because they were the ones who would benefit the most by the increased value of their post-regrade property. How much each property owner had to pay was determined by a three-person commission, which, as one can imagine, led to a few issues involving the courts.

Those early landscape remodelers ran into a few underground issues too. Their technology of choice was water, using hydraulic hoses, or giants, to wash away the hills. When they encountered small objects, such as buried forests, mammoth teeth, or once, a suspected meteorite that probably was just a boulder, they would stop and pluck it out, but when they ran into more obstinate objects—usually dense lenses of fine grained sediment—they would turn to the old reliable dynamite, blast the offender to bits, and continue remove the dirt. They had it a lot simpler back then.

Despite cost overruns, lawsuits, deaths, and delays, the city completed the major regrade projects, giving Seattle a new face. I suspect that Bertha will eventually get back on track too but it always amazes me how history repeats itself.

And because my momma done told me to, I am including a link to a story in the New York Times about Bertha.