Nisqually quake set off a political storm that shaped Seattle waterfront

SEATTLE – The 2001 Nisqually earthquake shook for just 40 seconds but triggered decades of political aftershocks that led Seattle to where it is today: at the grand opening of a new waterfront.

The promenade sits atop a new tunnel, anchored at its north end by an aquarium addition and the sprawling overlook walkway to Pike Place Market.

But this transformation was just one of many possible realities – more than 70, by one metric – that offered different visions of what an American city should and could be. The path to get here was one cut by individuals and their sometimes-warring personalities and preferences, motivated by politics, finances and idealism.

The result is largely final, celebrated by many, second-guessed by others.

Yet one thing is clear: “It has completely changed the face of the city,” former Mayor Greg Nickels said.

Crisis leads to opportunity

The first part of Seattle’s waterfront viaduct opened in 1953, and the scheming to replace it began almost immediately. A concrete gate between the city’s core and its Puget Sound piers, the elevated highway was rumbling, dirty and unsafe.

It also offered what was perhaps the best view in the city, albeit at more than 50 mph.

And yet it took an earthquake, the most powerful in most people’s memory, to force the issue. Within hours of the shaking, it was clear the double-decker road was imperiled. Some estimates said it would have come down had the quake lasted just 30 more seconds, likely killing hundreds.

Doug MacDonald just moved from Boston to lead the Washington State Department of Transportation when the earthquake hit. As it came into view that it had not caused widespread tragedy – one person died of a heart attack – the conversation quickly turned to the viaduct.

“Everybody knew that the viaduct was compromised,” he said.

At that point, the question was an engineering and logistical one, MacDonald recalled: How can we stabilize the roadway? Where should traffic go in the meantime? What about the buildings nearby?

MacDonald, though, had witnessed a highway removal in Boston and began to imagine what doors the tremor could open for Seattle’s long-isolated waterfront.

“I know from my own firsthand experience what it will mean to bring light and air to the portion of the city that now is loomed over by the horrendous viaduct because it has happened in my own neighborhood in Boston,” he remembers thinking.

But in the years that followed, there was little momentum. The state transportation department set about planning for a replacement, and lawmakers in Olympia seemed to favor keeping an elevated highway in place. The roadway had seeped into the city’s identity, and the panoramas it offered as cars sped through were a defining feature of entering Seattle.

Yet, despite the legislative lean toward a new viaduct, there were pockets of people questioning why the state and the city should waste a good crisis.

In an interview with HistoryLink, Cary Moon, who would become the face of antihighway sentiment along the waterfront, recalled thinking at the time: “That’s our most precious public land. It’s 22 acres in the heart of downtown on the bay. This needs to be a city-led process. It needs to be for the people, by the people, of the people.”

Tunnel becomes viable

Shortly after former Gov. Christine Gregoire took office in 2005, transportation leadership in the state began going through a sea change. The Legislature wanted more accountability from the department and gave Gregoire the oversight.

That coincided with two monumental decisions: what to do about the state Highway 520 bridge and what to do about the viaduct. Gregoire sometimes wondered what her predecessors did with their time without direct purview of the transportation department, she said.

On the question of the viaduct, she was surprised to find how little progress the state had made in deciding on a replacement option.

“Process, process and process some more,” Gregoire said of the dragging conversations.

The state’s studies would land on several options – prop up the existing viaduct, build a new one or tunnel underneath, either with a deep-bore machine or by digging a trench and covering it up.

The political winds were blowing toward replacement. For years, the deep-bore tunnel was largely dismissed as too expensive and logistically challenging in downtown’s soils, and a so-called cut-and-cover option struck fear into the hearts of waterfront businesses. Politically and financially, the most expedient option was to rebuild what was there.

But local opposition was gaining ground. Former Mayor Nickels was adamant that rebuilding the viaduct would be the wrong decision.

“I responded by saying, basically, ‘Over my dead body,’ ” he said.

Nickels’ thinking had been shaped, in part, by a gathering of mayors he’d attended in South Carolina, where he brought the replacement issue for discussion. His eyes were opened when attendees argued to him that the problem he needed to solve was not the north-south one, but rather the east-west one – in other words, how to connect the city to Puget Sound.

Residents’ opposition grew, too. Moon and her colleagues in the People’s Waterfront Coalition were arguing against either a new viaduct or a tunnel while the Seattle City Council passed a resolution supporting a tunnel.

At an impasse, state officials pushed for a vote of the people in 2007: You tell us what to do.

Nickels called the vote “very strange,” and the results yielded nothing: A majority opposed rebuilding the viaduct and a tunnel.

“So we’re left with kind of a muddled but blank slate,” he said.

Gregoire said the results were freeing because it was clear there was no consensus at any level, opening up elected leaders to restart their process.

“When it came out with what it did, it was a relief,” she said.

As Gregoire, Nickels and then-King County Executive Ron Sims convened a stakeholder group, something changed. Downtown interests began hammering again on the idea of a bored tunnel.

Ivar’s CEO Bob Donegan, along with others, began calling on the once-dismissed idea. One Bellevue-based expert told Donegan, “ ‘Of course, it will work. This is just terrific,’ ” Donegan said. “So that’s when we seriously began to look at the deep-bored tunnel option.”

Donegan single-handedly shifted the conversation toward the deep-bore tunnel, said state transportation leader MacDonald, though Donegan said it was a collection of people.

“Bob Donegan took the view that a cut-and-cover construction program on the waterfront would destroy Ivar’s and that was too high a price to pay for the preferred alternative,” he said.

The push to revive a bored tunnel option coincided with advances in tunnel technology. Where the state had once assumed it would need to dig two parallel tunnels, now industry voices were pointing to a single, massive machine of more than 50 feet that could drill just one tunnel. The cost had come down as well.

“When the door opened in terms of cost, that was it,” Gregoire said. Nearly eight years after the earthquake, she pulled the trigger.

“I respect process, but there comes a time when you have to make a decision and move forward,” she said.

Last-ditch opposition fails

But for some in Seattle, Gregoire’s decision was not the end of the road.

Some believed that the billions the state would spend on a tunnel could be better spent on transit and improvements to local roads – and that a tunnel would only encourage more driving in a city theoretically concerned about climate change.

Mike O’Brien remembers Moon making this pitch to the local chapter of the Sierra Club, and he immediately agreed. A believer that more roads only encourage more driving, he thought the city could make do without a new highway at all.

“Why don’t we spend a billion of that on transit and a billion on fixing surface streets, and pocket the other billion, and use it for housing or whatever?” he remembers thinking.

That belief helped fuel the elections of O’Brien to the Seattle City Council and Mike McGinn as mayor.

By the time both took office, the tunnel option was moving ahead. With an eye toward his successor’s swearing in, Nickels said he took every step he could to safeguard the tunnel option.

O’Brien, though, hoped he could make it politically “toxic” enough to slow it down and eventually kill it.

“The hope was that I could make my colleagues on the City Council look bad enough at doing this stupid thing that they would change their vote and the city would be opposed to a bored tunnel,” he said.

But he had no such luck. And so, he and McGinn lobbed one last Hail Mary: Another vote of the people, giving them the chance to say no to a bored tunnel via a nonbinding advisory vote.

They said the opposite, favoring a tunnel by nearly 20 percentage points.

“At that point, that was it,” O’Brien said.

Digging the tunnel was a saga unto itself – the machine, the largest in the world at the time, got stuck and needed complex subterranean repairs.

Gregoire acknowledged she felt panicked at times, but insisted the yearslong delays would quickly fade from memory. In the years since the tunnel’s completion, Gregoire said she rarely – if ever – has had anyone second-guess her decision to her face.

“Sometimes we have to look past the immediate and say, ‘What will we be proud of 30 years from now?’ ” she said.

O’Brien represents a conflicted reality.

He still believes the tunnel was a bad decision, particularly for the price. And yet, it’s a boon for his heat pump installation company.

“I drive my electric truck through that multiple times a day,” he said. “I wouldn’t say I’m grateful for it because, again, I don’t think it’s good policy, but it serves my company well. It’s subsidizing my company, which I don’t think is a smart thing to do.”

Modern waterfront emerges

The views of the viaduct have been replaced by a sweeping pedestrian overpass between the aquarium and Pike Place Market. The promenade is girded by a new seawall, and the smell of fresh mulch wafts over a winding – if narrow – bike lane.

The aboveground makeover of the waterfront, from the beach access near the ferries to the reconstructed piers near the aquarium, was an $800 million endeavor, funded by a local tax on downtown residents, private donations and local government.

For Nickels, Overlook Walk is “spectacular,” though he believes the whole of the project left too much space for car traffic. It’s a sentiment shared by many in the city’s urbanist-minded advocacy worlds, who at once appreciate the additional space for pedestrians and bicyclists while questioning why there couldn’t have been more.

It’s been more than 24 years since the Nisqually quake.

In the years since, the iPhone was invented, private companies regularly travel to outer space and every state and city political leader at the time has long since exited from office.

“It takes a long time to transform a city,” Nickels said. “And you have to be patient.”