Tag: seattle

Bertha – One year anniversary

One year ago today, an eight-inch-wide pipe went clunk, grind, and pfffth. Yes, it’s the anniversary of when Bertha, THE WORLD’S LARGEST TUNNEL BORING MACHINE, started to become the butt of jokes, world wide speculation, and persisent second guessing. After traveling for more than a 1,000 feet on her epic quest to drill a more than 9,000-foot long tunnel under Seattle, Bertha effectively came to non-grinding halt. The project is behind schedule, over cost, and even worse, a black eye in the fair face of Seattle’s ongoing quest to be a world class city.

The infamous pipe was 60 feet undergound and left over from a 2002 project to measure groundwater along the Alaskan Way Viaduct when Bertha attempted to gnaw her way through it. She wasn’t successful and instead pushed much of the pernsnickity pipe out of her way and kept digging for another three days. Bertha only stopped when she began to overheat. Her Twitter account of Dec 9 noted in an understatment: “Seeing some reports that I’m stuck. I’m working fine, but have encountered an obstruction.” Well, the reports were correct and she wasn’t actually fine.

WSDOT has longed claimed that the pipe was not the problem yet it seems rather peculiar that it took the tunnel gang one month to report the pipe to the public. As often happens, attemping to hide the truth gives a worse impression than simply being honest. It also seems curious and/or inept that they didn’t plan for the pipe, when they had documents showing where it was located. It makes sense that they could have done something about the pipe, like remove it.

Bertha has moved just a handful of feet since December 6, 2013. In the past year, we have learned that her main bearing seal was damaged. For some reason, contaminants had infiltrated the seal, making Bertha inoperable. Did the pipe harm the seals? Was it some unusual sediment? Was it something that won’t be discovered until they take Bertha completely apart and give engineers a chance to get their first complete look at the complete machine? At this point, we don’t know and one wonders if and when the lawyers will let us know.

We also don’t know when Bertha is going to be up and running again. The Seattle Tunnel Partners tells us that they are on schedule to start again in March 2015 but their track record does not necessarily lead one to believe that that will be the case. We’ll just have to wait and see, in what has turned into an epic story.

A few observations and questions.

  1. Engineers and crews have spent the past several months getting ready to take Bertha apart. Are they going to be able to put it back together correctly? How many of us have done something similar and not been able to repair the mess we made. And will they assemble it better than they did the first time?
  2. Did we get a lemon and did the contractor know it? As was pointed out last February, this wasn’t the first time Bertha had problems with her seals. They were also problematic in Japan, where she was built and where the problems were discovered during testing. Some have claimed that she wasn’t fixed right in the first place.
  3. This raises a follow up question after Bertha hit the pipe and began to overheat, why exactly was there the concerted push to keep her moving. Is it coincidental that Hitachi Zosen, the company that built Bertha, owns her for the first 1,300 feet, with Seattle Tunnel Partners taking ownership past that distance? If she had only gone another 300 feet, STP would face greater responsibility. Was there outside pressure to keep her moving beyond the 1,300 foot mark?
  4. What if it happens again, if a seal breaks or some other unexpected mechanical problem arises? As bad as the present situation is, it couldn’t have happened in much better of spot. Soon Bertha will be too deep to have a repair job on the order of the present one.
  5. Many have observed that the STP doesn’t appear to know what is under Seattle. According to geologists I spoke with, STP had and has a very good picture of what was and is under Seattle. (I wrote this before the report of water problems. I would still contend that they understand the geology but perhaps not the hydrology, which is very different and often much more complicated.) People have been digging up the city for decades and rarely do they find something that unexpected. (One might argue that the SLUT (South Lake Union Tusk) was unexpected but it really wasn’t. We know that mastodons, as well as giant sloths, lived and died here. They have been found before and will be again.) In a way, the tusk is similar to the oysters shells unearthed in October. It provides another detail to the story we mostly know, which is valuable, as it helps make the history of Seattle more fascinating and more accessible.)
  6. The archaeological work following Bertha’s stoppage has been one of the few positives. It has been done well but like Knute Berger, I wish that WSDOT archaeologists used the opportunity to do more than simply what is required. It would be great for them to see this as an opportunity to tap into resources they didn’t expect to see.

 

Seattle Map 7 – Bird’s Eye 1891

Augustus Koch arrived in Seattle in the summer of 1890. Like many his age, 49 years old, he had fought in the Civil War, where he had been draughtsman making maps. He had come to Seattle to do the same but it would not be a typical map. For the past two decades Koch had traveled the country producing fantastic aerial views of cities from Jacksonville, Florida, to Los Angeles. One newspaper reporter gushed that Koch’s maps depicted “every street, block, railroad track, switch and turn-table, every bridge, tree, and barn, in fact every object that would strike the eye of a man up a little ways in a balloon.”

[nggallery id=37]Koch achieved the same exquisite detail in Seattle, except that his imaginary viewer would have been very high up in a balloon, looking down at Seattle from a perspective over what is now Pigeon Point in West Seattle. Measuring 32 by 50 inches and published as a limited edition lithograph in January 1891, the map took six months to complete. (I have not been able to track down what it cost, how many were printed, who sold it, and how many survive.) Koch’s map combines an engineer’s quest for details and an artist’s imagination to make those details come to life.

Plying the waters of Elliott Bay are more than a dozen schooners, colliers, barks, tugs, sternwheelers, and paddle wheelers, as well as another dozen double- and triple-masted ships and paddle wheelers. Koch has named three of the larger vessels, the steamships Willamette and Walla Walla, and the U.S. Man of War Charleston, each more than 300 feet long. Long used for transporting coal from Seattle, the Walla Walla had recently been fitted as a passenger ship running between San Francisco and Puget Sound. Also making the same run was the Willamette, which in 1890 carried more than 49,000 tons of coal to California.

Koch’s smaller vessels were part of the legendary Mosquito Fleet. Generally powered by steam and with flat bottoms, which allowed access to shallow ports and travel up river, the fleet ferried everything from eggs to mail to people to lumber. They were the short haul truckers of the day, keeping far flung communities throughout Puget Sound supplied with goods from the main port in Seattle.

What stands out most is the phenomenal presence of rail. Fifteen trains, the longest of which pulls 16 cars, travel on tracks to, through, and from Seattle. More waiting boxcars rest on the tracks and thirteen trolleys carry passengers across the city. The tracks of the trains so dominate the waterfront that you cannot reach any part of Elliott Bay from Beacon Hill to Smith Cove without crossing at least one and up to five tracks.

Supplementing the several miles of train trestles on the tidal flats is an extensive wharf system. They give the city’s south end an appearance of trying to become a new Venice, floating atop the water. These were working wharves with a ship building facility, several lumber mills with vast piles of logs, immense coal bunkers, railroad depots, boiler works, a hotel, a laundry, and a foundrys. More piers extend west over the tidal flats from the base of Beacon Hill, including one shingle mill with a vast pile of sawdust in front of it, reminiscent of sandy island in a tidal lagoon.

I have no reason to doubt the basic veracity of Koch’s drawings. In other parts of the country where Koch worked, modern researchers have compared his bird’s eye views with photographs and maps and found him to be remarkably accurate. I have though talked to a maritime historian who told me that all of those ships couldn’t have been in the harbor on the same day (they would needed too much space to turn around), but his portrait accurately reflects what a typical Seattleite would have seen in their growing city.

[UW Architecture professor Jeffrey Ochsner pointed out in a follow up email to me that Koch’s map is not perfect. “Those who drew these images wanted to keep them up-to-date, so they put in buildings that were expected to be built. In some cases those buildings were not built. The 1891 panoramic lithograph of Seattle shows the Seattle Opera House by Adler & Sullivan that never went beyond the foundation (and, as I recall, it also shows the Equitable Building by John Parkinson, a building that never went forward). There may be other buildings that were not built but these two are the ones I know of.”]

In the 18 months since the Great Fire of 1889 had burned downtown to the ground, everyone had rushed to rebuild, usually bigger and certainly more substantial with brick and stone instead of wood. The sounds of hammers, saws, chisels, sledges, and pile-drivers resounded with the Seattle Spirit. Ships arrived daily bringing in goods and supplies and taking out raw materials. Seattleites would have to wait two more years for direct transcontinental rail service, but trains arrived and departed daily from points south and east. It must have been an exciting time to live here.

Although the map represents Koch’s vision of Seattle, and not a true-to-life photographic picture, it does provide a remarkable snapshot of a city on the cusp of change from its pioneer roots to its status as the most important city in the state.

Material for for this story comes out of research I have done for my new book on Seattle – Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography.

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