As Seattle's new State Route 99 tunnel welcomes vehicle traffic, crews continue to demolish the aging (it opened in 1953) and vulnerable Alaskan Way Viaduct along the waterfront.
The Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Tunnel was originally slated to open in December 2015, but faced years of delays when the tunnel-boring machine malfunctioned beneath downtown Seattle.
Bertha made the tunnel, but now Seattle Tunnel Partners crews working on behalf of the Washington State Dept. of Transportation must turn that tunnel into a workable 1.7-mile double-decker roadway.
No transformation has proven quite as dramatic as in Seattle where the two pits—one at the south end of the project and the other at the north end, near the Space Needle—will require full transformations to serve the needs of the double-decker tunnel roadway.
