With the Viaduct Coming Down, What Are They Doing with All That Concrete? Related question: What happens to the decommissioned Battery Street Tunnel?

They’re literally going to stuff the Battery Street Tunnel with the old freeway. Aaron Bagley

When I heard that the Alaskan Way Viaduct was going to be demolished, I immediately yearned for one thing and one thing only: dynamite.

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I wanted to see that creaky old raised highway blown up into a million pieces, just like I saw the Kingdome blown up back in 2000. But Laura Newborn, a spokesperson for the Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Project, assured me that blowing up the 60-year-old elevated highway was never a possibility.

"We had four different proposals, none of which included dynamite," Newborn said. "The viaduct is simply too close to structures to be safely taken down [that way]. It needs to be taken down piece by piece, which is how they will do it."

Damn you, Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), not wanting to interrupt people ordering the Pacific Clambake at the Crab Pot on Pier 57! Instead of dynamite, WSDOT will slowly disassemble the 1.4-mile-long highway over the course of 2019, requiring only intermittent road closures.

Your last chance to drive on this seismically unsafe highway, risking it all, will be on Friday, January 11, when the viaduct will close at 10 p.m. WSDOT will then start to work around the clock to realign Highway 99 into its new $3 billion tunnel, which is replacing the old raised highway. That will take almost a month. The replacement tunnel is set to open to cars in early February.

What happens to the viaduct's 90,000 daily drivers during that time? They'll probably create one of the most drawn-out traffic jams in Seattle's history.

According to WSDOT, transit agencies are preparing for the largest highway closure in Puget Sound history by adding more bus and water-taxi trips, removing parking from key downtown streets, and opening up carpool lanes on the interstate.

If you want to get a closer look at the viaduct, the old Battery Street Tunnel, and the new Highway 99 tunnel, you have a full weekend to party your face off before the new tunnel opens. On Saturday, February 2, you can pay to run an 8K on the viaduct, in the old tunnel, and in the new tunnel, or you can register for a free ticket to leisurely walk through the new tunnel. On Sunday, you can pay to ride your bike in the new tunnel, on the raised viaduct, and in the old Battery Street Tunnel.

This will be your last opportunity to ever be inside the Battery Street Tunnel, which runs under Belltown, connecting the viaduct to Aurora Avenue. As logical as it would be to keep that tunnel in existence and maybe transform it into a permanent bike or jogging path, or The Stranger's pet project (a municipally owned mushroom farm), that is not happening. Seattle Department of Transportation didn't have the money to do anything cool like that, according to Newborn.

Instead, WSDOT plans to fill the Battery Street Tunnel with the 122,000 tons of concrete that will be removed from the Alaskan Way Viaduct. They're just going to jam all that concrete into the old tunnel, sealing it up for good.

Asked to comment on this missed opportunity, Newborn said: "It was going to cost upwards of $100 million to retrofit that tunnel and make it safe for other uses, and that money was out of the question for them. So they decided to go ahead with the original plan, which was since 2010 to fill in the Battery Street Tunnel."