Divers speak after discovering piles of electrocuted fish under I-90 bridge
Sep 9, 2026, 5:48 PM
(Photo courtesy of KIRO 7)
(Photo courtesy of KIRO 7)
Sound Transit is working to fix an electrical issue along the Crosslake Connection over Lake Washington. The agency believes the issue was killing fish.
A pair of divers discovered the issue by accident.
They said they first spotted cables hanging down from the bridge near piles of dead fish last summer. They didn’t think much of it until they returned this summer and found even more dead fish.
“We’ve been exploring the ruins of the 1990 bridge collapse,” Shahein Moussavi, one of the divers w\ho discovered the fish, said.
Moussavi and his friend, Travis Eiler, run the Seattle chapter of the nonprofit diving group Global Underwater Explorers. They dive around the I-90 bridge all the time but made a series of shocking discoveries on their most recent visits.
“It was, I don’t know, a four-foot-in-diameter and maybe two feet high pile of weird dead fish,” Eiler said.
The pair told KIRO 7 they kept finding more dead fish and more cables on the lake bottom, hanging from the bridge.
“I thought maybe it was some kind of WDFW test, like they had dropped down a net of fish to see what was going to come and eat it or something,” Eiler said.
They reported the situation to the authorities and found out it was not a test.
Sound Transit is now taking responsibility for the fish deaths, blaming its floating light rail line.
“We responded immediately by deploying teams of divers and engaging fish biologists and engineers,” Dow Constantine, CEO of Sound Transit, said at a board meeting last week.
Constantine said the cables at the bottom of the lake were likely electrocuting the fish.
He said crews raised the cables from the bottom and multiple agencies are now monitoring the situation.
Eiler and Moussavi said they are pleased by the quick response, but still have concerns after returning to the site this week.
“There weren’t any new, fresh kills that I noticed other than one fish Shahein and I saw yesterday that was lying there alive,” Eiler said. “If you touched it, it would swim a little bit. I could not get it to leave the area. It was like a zombie fish; it just wanted to be there.”
KIRO 7 reached out to Sound Transit for an update. A spokesperson said they were working to gather the latest information.
