(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 25, 2024
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 28, 2024

From cramped corners to dizzy heights, ‘Supertunnel’ story shines

By Jean Sherrard

Though a young Catherine Bassetti ran away to join a circus aerial act, nothing prepared her for the dizzying altitudes she encountered documenting Seattle’s most audacious construction project of this millennium.

Her dazzling illustrated book, “Supertunnel: Building Seattle’s State Route 99 — Journey from Light to Light,” provides a backstage view of the project’s colossal scale. As a re-imagined waterfront nears completion on the tunnel’s fifth anniversary, Bassetti’s luminous photos illustrate trials, tribulations and triumphs.

“It provides a detailed analysis of the complete ‘design-build’ of the tunnel,” she says, “as well as the groundbreaking engineering and complex problem-solving that took place.”

First, the backstory. The 2.2-mile-long Alaskan Way Viaduct opened April 4, 1953, immediately becoming Seattle’s most traveled north-south corridor. The looming double-deck highway, while dividing the city from its waterfront, also offered drivers a spectacular unfolding vista — the loss of which is still lamented.

In 2001, the magnitude 6.8 Nisqually earthquake shook the region, causing widespread destruction, including alarming damage to the viaduct’s support structure. After long debate over possible fixes, the state Department of Transportation, King County and the City of Seattle announced in January 2009 that the viaduct would be replaced by a tunnel.

Construction began in July 2013 with the arrival of Bertha (named after Seattle’s first woman mayor, Bertha Knight Landes), then the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine. After significant delays, boring ended in 2017. Two years later, the tunnel opened.

Fittingly for the project’s visual documentarian, composition and design run in Bassetti’s family. Her grandfather, Joseph W. Wilson, helped create downtown’s Northern Life Tower (1929), an art-deco landmark. Her father, architect Fred Bassetti, is responsible for several of our region’s greatest hits, from the Seattle Aquarium (1971) to the Seattle Municipal Tower (1989).

Bassetti’s own early Barnum & Bailey stint and career as a European commercial photographer honed physical and pictorial skills that landed her the job of photographing the full tunnel project. She wound up in places she’d never anticipated, from squeezing into cramped corners underground to dangling from cranes.

With dozens of vertiginous and expansive views, “Supertunnel” details the unique journey of documenting a vast, structural tour de force of engineering. By revealing views hitherto unseen, it finds beauty in the depths and heights. From start to finish, the book follows the tunnel’s breathless path — as the book’s optically attuned subtitle aptly states, from light to light.

WEB EXTRAS

Let’s add another link those interested in Catherine Bassetti’s remarkable book. Click through to check out her gorgeous jigsaw puzzle as well! Head on over to:
thesupertunnel.com

And nearing the fifth anniversary of the tunnel’s inauguration, maybe a 360 degree video voyage on the Alaskan Way Viaduct’s last day would be apropos. Clay and I shot it through a friend’s sun roof.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 11, 2024
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 14, 2024

A drowned ghost town reemerges in times of intensified drought

By Jean Sherrard

“A new-world Venice.”

That’s how The Seattle Times described a “little village” seven miles south of North Bend and 35 miles southeast of Seattle. Photos accompanying the May 14, 1915, front-page article provided dramatic evidence. Most of the burg’s 200 houses were half submerged by slowly rising flood waters.

A company town, Moncton, was established in 1906 by the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad while carving its transcontinental line through Snoqualmie Pass. It thrived on the picturesque Rattlesnake Prairie within the Cedar River watershed.

Rail workers soon were joined by utilities employees from nearby Seattle water and hydroelectric dams. By 1909, the town boasted a grocery, hotel, saloon and 30-student school. The town, less than 3 miles from Cedar Lake, Seattle’s primary water reservoir, was euphoniously renamed Cedar Falls. It must have seemed an idyllic spot to plant roots.

In 1912, City Light began building an imposing masonry dam intended to further harness Cedar River waters to supplement Seattle’s increasing electrical needs.

Cue ominous music.

Consulting geologists cautioned that surrounding valleys were comprised of porous glacial moraine unsuitable for water containment. But their warnings were overruled by J.D. Ross, Seattle’s superintendent of lighting.

Cedar Falls paid the piper. Soon after completion of the masonry dam in early 1915, springs erupted from surrounding hills and seeped up from the formerly dry prairie. By summer, all but two families had departed their flooded homes and were living in boxcars or makeshift houses above the rising waterline.

Initially, Seattle Mayor Hiram Gill denied responsibility, blaming the flooding on natural causes. After months of dithering, wiser heads prevailed. The town was condemned and its dispossessed residents compensated for their losses.

Amy LaBarge, Seattle’s current Watershed Management Division director, has watched Rattlesnake Lake rise and fall for decades. In December, after months of drought, the lake’s water levels dropped to the lowest she’s seen. “Our summers are definitely getting longer and warmer, and therefore drier,” she says.

A trained forest ecologist, LaBarge notes that volatile and extreme weather patterns are associated with increasing frailty of the forest ecosystem. “Over the last few years, we’re seeing alarming waves of tree mortality,” she says. “Multiple species have become highly susceptible to things that wouldn’t normally kill them.”

How, then, to manage future water supply in a climate changing world?

“Humans will have to learn to be very, very careful with how we use non-renewable resources like water,” LaBarge says. “We must conserve — not just for people, but for salmon and wildlife and all the other beings that call this place home.”

WEB EXTRAS

To see Jean Sherrard‘s 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Jean, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Also, a few more photos.

 

Throughout the dry lake, evidence of the abandoned town can be seen in old growth stumps and structural remains (click for full size).

 

 

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

UPDATE: “The Bellwether Sheep of the Mosquito Fleet” won second place in the the Robert Kotta Memorial Song Writing Contest. Winners will perform at 1:45 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 9, 2025, at the Port Gamble Maritime Music Festival. Admission is free.

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 4, 2024
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 7, 2024

For whom the bell(wether) tolls: The 1904 calamity of the Clallam

By Clay Eals

So often have we heard: “Don’t do something just because others do it. Don’t be a sheep.” Well, sometimes a sheep can lead us all. Possibly save lives.

One-hundred-twenty years ago, just as now, a popular way to reach key points along Puget Sound and the Salish Sea was over water. Today, we might drive onto a state ferry. In 1904, we would have walked aboard a private predecessor.

That year, on the blustery morning of Jan. 8 at Pier 1 at the foot of Seattle’s Yesler Way, the stately SS Clallam, just 9 months old and deemed the queen of the informally named Mosquito Fleet, took on 61 passengers bound for Port Townsend and Victoria, B.C.

Also clambering aboard was an agglomeration of sheep. All, that is, but one. Known as Billy, the bellwether animal wore a bell and for years led herds aboard vessels headed for the provincial capital.

That morning he was “particularly stubborn,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. Billy “threatened dire things to anyone who tried to drag him aboard. The tossing waves did not look good to him.” When the Clallam shoved off, Billy remained ashore.

What followed was unspeakable tragedy. While the steamer reached Port Townsend without incident, it confronted gale winds while entering the Strait of Juan de Fuca, taking on water and launching three lifeboats filled with women and children, all of whom perished in the storm. Overnight, tracing a triangular path in the strait, the Clallam broke apart and sank.

The final death toll: 56. Survivors, including crew, numbered just 36.

Learning of the calamity last fall, Queen Anne singer-songwriter Jon Pontrello, 37, decided to pen a ballad to commemorate its 120th anniversary. Ensnaring his imagination was the role of the bellwether sheep.

Survivors claimed Billy had “a way of knowing what the weather will be that, for accuracy, puts to shame all the storm signals and information of the weather bureaus,” the P-I reported. So Pontrello’s 8-minute song summons a haunting hero:

There may be a seer among us
whose actions we don’t understand,
an omen that throws into question
all the things you had planned

Some sheep are meant to follow,
and some are meant to lead,
so when that bell starts ringing
you know that you better take heed

For Pontrello, the lesson evokes a potent metaphor. “The way I think about it is, we’re all on this voyage,” he says. “The sea is like the universe, the ship is you, and you are the captain of that ship.”

Of course, we each can ask: Who is our bellwether?

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Nat Howe, executive director of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society, and especially Jon Pontrello for their invaluable help with this installment!

See Jon Pontrello perform the full song in video below and in concert Jan. 11 and 13, as indicated in the poster below. Also, he will play the song at 1 p.m. Monday, Jan. 8, the 120th anniversary of the Clallam sinking, on 91.3FM KBCS.

Here are two extensive articles on the Clallam tragedy:

• essay by Daryl McClary at HistoryLink.org
• essay by Peter Grant of Victoria

Due to technical difficulties, there is no 360-degree video this week. However, below you will find a poster, 2 videos featuring Jon Pontrello and, in chronological order, 15 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), SGN and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.