The Viaduct Conspiracy


[ Seattle in 1925 ]

As the stakeholder committee gets into it, viaduct buzz is noticeably notching up. Local urban designer David Sucher, who has been relentlessly predicting a retrofit for years, recently reiterated his view here, but what caught my attention was his assertion that the government has been intentionally misleading the public — our local version of the Iraq War, as he put it.

A few months ago over at Crosscut, C.R. Douglas evoked similar suspicions in a blog post about the “myth” of unstable soil under the viaduct columns, questioning why he was only just learning that the viaduct “is on fairly stable footing.” The answer, of course, is that he hadn’t done his research. No such myth ever entered into any legitimate engineering analysis of the viaduct. Still, Sucher chimed in with a comment about the “conspiracy of silence.”

To paraphrase the conspiracy theory, if I may: Safety concerns and the cost of retrofitting were both dishonestly overstated by government officials in order to garner support for the tunnel option, which was then believed to be a big political winner. Now that the tunnel is off the table, these same officials have no choice but to pretend to entertain the possibility of the surface option, since they can’t reneg on their prior safety and cost claims. The surface option supporters play right into it because they’re such ideologues that they refuse to listen to even a word about a retrofit. But in the end, all that’s irrelevant anyway because the conspirators have perfect confidence that no consensus will be reached and the retrofit will become the inevitable fall back option. Capiche?

Meanwhile, Popular Mechanics just put the Alaskan Way Viaduct on its top ten list of “pieces of U.S. infrastructure we must fix now.”

Though it may sound like I’m being totally dismissive, I’m actually not. I’m not so naive as to believe such a thing could never happen. But this Sightline comment thread from two years ago all but puts it to bed for me. One study (Twelker/Gray) supports a relatively cheap retrofit, while multiple studies — including some that were conducted in Universities and have been peer reviewed — are in agreement about the high cost of retrofitting. Also, the first engineering study showing the high cost of a retrofit was done in 1995 “before the tunnel idea was even on the drawing board,” pre-Nickels, pre-Gregoire. I suppose the new administrations might be compelled to carry on the conspiracy to preserve the Party, but how far can you stretch this thing?

But still, I’m keeping on open mind on this. If any of you readers out there can point to concrete evidence on viaducty shenanigans, let’s have it.