What We Learned at Yesterday's City vs. State Fight over Bertha's Rescue Pit

Sydney Brownstone

Close-up on the rescue pit of despair. The yellow bit is the part workers were stabilizing.

Pit bad? No, pit good.

That about sums up much of the two-hour Washington State Department of Transportation briefing in front of the city council yesterday, in which council members peppered the state with questions about a strongly worded letter the Seattle Department of Transportation and Seattle Public Utilities fired off last week. In it, city officials expressed alarm over the fact that language about "risk of a catastrophic failure" disappeared from a draft report by rescue pit engineers with no explanation.

Shouldn't city agencies have been contacted about concerns related to a potential "catastrophic failure"? Why weren't they? And why did the language change? Did "risk of a catastrophic failure" refer to the pit's impact on the viaduct? Did the Washington State Department of Transportation tell the contractor to stop digging in mid-December because of this risk?

WSDOT’s Todd Trepanier hardly disguised his irritation with the letter and the city council's subsequent line of questioning. "There never has been, and there is currently not, any risk of failure," he said. "That is a gross mischaracterization of that word ‘catastrophic’ in the report."

Earlier, Trepanier stressed WSDOT’s disappointment with SDOT's actions: "To send this letter, to provide it to the press before we were able to respond, is not in keeping with the partnership we established with the city, the county, and the port, and needlessly escalates public fear," he said.

According to the state, Seattle transportation officials went into the tunnel project's shared database, cherry-picked the report, then cherry-picked the language in it. The draft report listed action items needed in order to keep excavating. WSDOT says the language that changed dealt with stabilizing soil between support columns around the hole. When the report's authors—rescue pit engineers—noticed that the grouting between those columns ("piles") had not been fully completed, they issued a report warning about "repair as we go" excavation and the potential for "catastrophic failure."

Which still didn't make a ton of sense to most other people in the room. (If you like, you can dive into the full context of the draft report here, and its final version here.) Included among the perplexed were members of the city council, who received the full draft report at the briefing but still had a lot of unanswered questions about what it all actually meant.

Council Members Kshama Sawant and Mike O'Brien provided some of the most vocal—and colorful—interrogations of WSDOT’s explanation. "I used to be an engineer," Sawant said. "Engineers are not given to hyperbole. When an engineer says 'catastrophic failure,' it has to mean something of importance to the public. I find it incomprehensible that something that was categorized as a 'catastrophic failure' wasn’t a source of alarm." Later, she asked WSDOT to stop "jamming the discussion" with technical jargon.

At one point, Council Member Tim Burgess asked about why the decision to change the language was made. "That would be something that I would have to speculate on," Trepanier said. And yet, later in the briefing, WSDOT revealed that its staff had stamped the report, indicating an "over the shoulder" review of the changes. How could WSDOT review changes—even informally—and not know how those changes were made?

Sydney Brownstone

WSDOT also gave the city council updates on settlements around Pioneer Square. Settlements stabilized after sinking a little more than an inch last year, WSDOT said.

WSDOT also suggested that because of SDOT's transgression, they might limit access to the database and come up with a better way to share information with city agencies. No council members seemed particularly pleased by the suggestion.

After WSDOT's presentation, SDOT director Scott Kubly downplayed public safety fears and said that the letter primarily dealt with a communication breakdown.

"This is the type of information that should have been elevated," Kubly told reporters after the meeting. "I think the number-one thing that should have happened is somebody from WSDOT saying there's a report, here's what it says, we’re going to be changing the language because the following reason, and we want you to be aware of what and why so you didn't get concerned down the road."

SDOT staff met with the state after sending the letter, but Kubly said that SDOT's engineers had yet to receive a thorough answer about the draft report's edits. Kubly added that he was confident that would happen soon.

Council Member O'Brien remained skeptical about the report's weird editing.

"I’m not satisfied," O’Brien told reporters after the briefing. "I would have felt a lot better if WSDOT were acknowledging that this was a safety issue instead of pointing fingers at SDOT and closing off access to documents. In both [documents] I see a very high level of concern from an engineer about how the project had been proceeding until that point."

So, what did we learn?

- SDOT still hasn't gotten a full explanation for the language changes.

- WSDOT staff saw those changes, or at least they signed off on them.



- We still don’t really know why "risk of a catastrophic failure" was deleted.

- The rescue pit is roughly 20 feet away from the nearest bent (a viaduct support structure), and Council Member O'Brien is pretty worried about that.

- WSDOT is pissed that SDOT went through its drawers.

- The city council is trying to make peace between the two levels of government.

- SDOT has a mid- to long-term contingency plan for shuttering the viaduct. It's also hired independent engineers, CH2M Hill, to get another opinion on whether dewatering and Bertha’s rescue threaten the aging structure.

Final takeaway? The city’s taking steps to hold WSDOT accountable and plan for the worst on its own. And even though the council meeting turned into a theatrical finger-pointing exercise over WSDOT's failure to communicate, the state still owes the city an explanation in English—and better ones moving forward.

This post has been updated since its original publication.