Seattle's viaduct is built on landfill and is not in the best of conditions. Instead of expanding I-5 or building a surface artery, the Seattle planners decided to dig underneath the waterfront.
Things are not going as planned - from Sound Politics:
"Happy Bertha-day"
The Seattle tunneling machine has been stuck for one year, and now the date for its return to service has been postponed, again.
At the one-year anniversary of the stalling of tunnel boring under Seattle, new problems have emerged in the form of about 1.2 inches of ground subsidence at the site.
Over the weekend, state transportation crews will be inspecting and ground and several spans of the Alaska Way Viaduct to determine the cause and extent of the sinking. It was detected after the Thanksgiving holiday.
Postponed by just one month, from March to April, a slip that will not reassure those familiar with large projects. (In such projects, a small slip is often a harbinger of more small slips, and perhaps a large slip, yet to come.)
Some will find this postponement ironic, since the tunnel is intended to replace the Viaduct, because the Viaduct might collapse during an earthquake. Now, the tunneling may be endangering the Viaduct.
This series of failures, if not exactly predictable, should not surprise anyone, for two reasons: First, as the largest tunneling machine ever built, Bertha is a prototype, and prototypes often require re-design, or at least some minor fixes. Second, the Washington State Department of Transportation, which is supervising the project, has been in charge of a whole series of disasters, enough to make almost anyone conclude that either the department is exceptionally unlucky, or it is not as competent as it ought to be.
It won't happen, but, as I have said before, we really ought to rename the machine after the person responsible for this disaster, former governor Christine Gregoire.
And they leave it up to the rest of us in WA State to fund this boondoggle through our tax dollars. Big transportation projects never work out as planned and the politicians who start them are usually out of office by the time they fail. No incentive to keep the projects on time or budget.
