If you’ve walked or driven along 35th St. towards Stone Way, you may have wondered what is going on just north of the transfer station at 35th and Interlake. That site is the location of the eastern terminus of the Ship Canal Water Quality Project which I wrote about here back in January of 2020. The overall goal is to reduce sewage overflows into the ship canal during times of heavy rain by providing a very temporary storage location for that water: a big tunnel running underground from Wallingford to Ballard. That tunnel, and its attendant pumping stations and other infrastructure is what is under construction now.
We received this update recently from Stephanie Secord, Project Manager for Seattle Public Utilities concerng the Wallingford site:
Dear neighbors,
We have power to the site! The backup generator is still on site, in the wooden structure – it’ll only be used if we lose power. The fan you have been hearing runs the ventilation system for the workers while they are in the shaft. Our contractor installed additional silencers over the past week. Also, excavation of the shaft was completed yesterday. Since the excavator is out of the shaft the fan speed can be reduced which will also help mitigate the noise. The next task will be to install the 11-foot thick reinforced concrete slab at the base of the shaft. The pour day is currently scheduled for Thursday June 17. On that day, concrete trucks will be arriving at the site constantly throughout the day.
Thank you again for your patience and your feedback.
StephanieStephanie Secord, PE, PMP
SPU SCWQP Storage Tunnel Project Manager
SPU Cell Phone 206-486-6180
In addition to the Wallingford site, there are four other work sites which you may have noticed. The East Ballard site, on NW 45th Street near the Fred Meyer, has been closed to cars because of the construction. A second Ballard site is just off of Shilshole Way. If you bike along the Burke Gilman Trail in Fremont, then you’ve encountered the Fremont site at the western edge of the green space that runs along the ship canal. A final site is just across the canal from there on the western edge of the Seattle Pacific campus. More information about each of these project sites is available here.
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The other end of this thing, I think, is just northwest of Fred Meyer, and is the reason they’ve got that road blocked off. We spent a little while yesterday at the (plant) nursery there, and I asked the two clerks about the horrendous noise the machinery makes. They kinda just rolled their eyes. I can’t imagine having to work in that without hearing protection! 😯
There is another large part of this project further than that, up by the intersection of Shilshole and Market. It’s immense.
For those, like me, who find these weird infrastructure projects kind of awesome. Tokyo has the world’s largest one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Area_Outer_Underground_Discharge_Channel
“It consists of five concrete containment silos with heights of 65 m and diameters of 32 m, connected by 6.4 km of tunnels, 50 m beneath the surface, as well as a large water tank with a height of 25.4 m, with a length of 177 m, with a width of 78 m, and with 59 massive pillars connected to 78 10 MW (13,000 hp) pumps that can pump up to 200 tons of water into the Edo River per second.”