Separated at Bertha

A mound of loose dirt is illuminated with the golden evening sun. A shovel stabs into it, lifting its burden and tossing it away from the pit as the camera pans back. We see a helpless victim digging her own grave. It is the stuff of terror and repulsion in fiction and yet, this really happened.

Seattle is digging its own grave, not with a mere shovel but with a 326-foot long, 7,000-ton tunneling machine known as “Bertha.” Instead of being greeted with fear and aversion, the arrival of Bertha was greeted by a water display from the Seattle Fire Department, banners from the Washington State Ferries and a welcome sign on the outdoor Seattle Aquarium marquee.

The celebration came because many saw the tunneling machine not as a transportation-dollar gravedigger, but as a savior for Seattle’s future. Bertha represented a second chance at creating a waterfront without towering concrete, a waterfront worthy of the Emerald City.

Since the 1950s, Seattle’s waterfront has been marred by the Alaskan Way Viaduct, a double-decker highway that lay between the city and the Puget Sound. Drivers enjoy breathtaking views of Elliott Bay and the Olympics, while many in Seattle are stuck with views of cars driving on a structure with all the charm of Soviet architecture.

In 2001, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake caused enough damage to the viaduct that the need to replace it for the safety of the city and the preservation of transportation infrastructure became essential — so essential that elected officials spent the better part of the next decade debating how it should be replaced.

Washington State’s Department of Transportation found a silver lining in the delays. In that time, a bored tunnel alternative that had been deemed too expensive somehow “re-emerged as an affordable option.” Or at least an option that politicians could claim was affordable.

By that point, bored tunnel proponents now had a public numbed by continuous warnings of the viaduct’s immanent collapse should another earthquake strike and a public positively bored to death with the decade of indecision that followed the news that the viaduct needed replacing.
Critics of the tunnel divided between those who wanted a viaduct replacement and those who dreamed of a world without cars or freight and wanted a “surface street option.” This further enabled tunnel proponents to push the state into the most expensive option.

While the Pacific Northwest may be famous for its disbelief in God, the vision of moving 100,000 additional cars onto Seattle’s already impassable streets was certainly enough to make Washingtonians think of Hell on Earth.

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