In Seattle, a Sinking Feeling About a Troubled Tunnel

"While construction unions are backing this project, labor disputes could also get in the way."

Some union dispute indeed delayed the start of the tunnel by a month.

On the other hand many of the cited possible problems might have been amenable to fixing in place, e.g. the cutters in the front are replaceable. The terrible problem now is that its main bearing is messed up (forget if it's just one or more seals, or worse, or even if they really know yet), requiring this major excavation to get to it and then surgery. If the problem wasn't, or wasn't uniquely caused by that steel well casing, it could get broken again ... it's only done 10% or so of the length.

And, yeah, the traffic projections aren't great. As I remember, no matter how people go "wow!" about the size of the tunnel, the capacity of it will be quite a bit less than the viaduct. Then there are all the other factors that can make it less desirable.

The Stranger has a long history of fighting losing fights to keep things more-or-less the same -- unless the alternative is trendy and/or guaranteed not to impact Capitol Hill. For example, they'd prefer that the viaduct be replaced with a "surface boulevard" that has a fraction of the throughput, thus all but guaranteeing decades of gridlock in downtown Seattle (which they like because it "discourages driving", because they heard that San Francisco did it...and most importantly, because it doesn't affect their lives either way).

Meanwhile, they complain constantly about light rail on the hill, but they campaigned heavily for the monorail-to-nowhere. Why? Because it was a monorail (cool!), and the construction wouldn't affect their favorite neighborhood (even better!)

Point being, it's not difficult to pull an article from the Stranger predicting doom for a major urban planning initiative. That's practically their stock in trade.

We all know about assumptions, but this shouldn't be entirely blamed on the contractor, especially since WSDOT is ultimately responsible for the project.

There's clearly a serious if not fatal problem with leadership of the whole project, which as I noted has very bad incentives that are aligned with allowing problems.

In this case, there should have been someone obsessing on the path of the tunnel. And then the boring crew, its supervisors etc. should not have, after hitting the casing (which cased the top part to jump many feet into the air), blithely continued boring until the machine failed hard (that could have turned something relatively fixable into the disaster they have now).

I'm unimpressed.

The very urban portions of the coastal areas pay most of the taxes, while the rest of the rural parts pay a much smaller portion. Unfortunately, the rural parts (basically anything not directly within x miles of the coast) see this as a massive waste for something that won't benefit them.

The implications of this are far-reaching and incredibly polarizing for our state. Not good.

"Preedy said that when Bertha was being built in Japan, one of the tests performed was to turn on the motors and rotate the cutter head. That’s when testers heard a noise and took Bertha apart. They found that some parts of the machine weren’t moving properly and caused “some metal-on-metal contact and basically damaged the seal assembly for the main bearing,” Preedy said."

This was a manufacturing problem discovered when it was first spun up in a test, as far as I can tell not even involving any digging, just making sure everything functioned correctly (e.g. what NASA didn't do with the Hubble mirror).

[1] http://www.therobbinscompany.com/en/our-products/