SEATTLE — Robie G. Russell can look out the window of his law office here and see one of the nation’s biggest, and perhaps most troubled, urban tunnel projects unfolding across the street in a daily swarm of machines and hard-hatted workers.

And if he turns his gaze, he can see what he believes is an unhappy consequence of that project: a new crack in his wall, about 10 inches long, running through the old brick masonry next to one of his framed bar certificates.

“This is definitely new,” he said on Tuesday morning, peering at the fissure.

Ancient Egypt endured plagues of locusts. Seattle has its tunnel, which over the last year has featured a series of setbacks and fiascos that, depending on one’s outlook, can be the setup for a punch line, or an eye-rolling narrative of put-upon endurance.

Image Efforts to reach a clogged digging machine. Credit... Washington Department of Transportation, via Associated Press

In the latest blow, project engineers said this week that 30 or more buildings in the historic Pioneer Square area — a staging area for Klondike gold rush miners heading north to Alaska in the late 1800s and now one of the city’s premier tourist stops — had unexpectedly settled, possibly because of water pumping related to the project.