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The holiday season provided some rest for Bertha, the tunnel-boring machine roughly three-quarters of the way through its route to bore a new State Route 99 tunnel under downtown Seattle, but that doesn’t mean crews have had it so easy.

The year 2017 shouldn’t have had any major projects slated for the Multnomah County-owned Morrison Bridge in Portland, but the 1958-built bascule bridge spanning the Willamette River will get one much-needed repair to its roadway this year, a completely new lift span deck.

As work moves forward on the Hanford Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) at the Dept. of Energy’s Hanford Nuclear Waste Site in southeastern Washington, crews have started the final stage of testing intended to resolve one of the remaining technical issues on the project.

As stormwater runs aplenty in Seattle, the act of treating that stormwater before it reaches the streams, rivers and lakes that surround the Pacific Northwest city can help create an official salmon safe designation.

The vast majority of 2016 Bertha news has fallen into the positive category, a welcome respite for the $3.1 billion project to replace Seattle’s aging Alaskan Way Viaduct with a 1.7-mile-long bored tunnel.

Vancouver, B.C.’s TransLink SkyTrain light rail system added 11 kilometers (6.8 miles) of track this month while announcing planning will start soon on yet another addition to the system.

As one of the first cities in the U.S. to lid a freeway when Freeway Park covered Interstate 5 in Seattle in 1976, the attraction of freeway lids has never fully dissipated from the minds of those in Seattle.

The Washington State Dept. of Transportation plans to retire the Newaukum River Bridge after 86 years of service, but the government agency remains open to handing over the historic bridge to someone interested in coming and getting it.

The forward-churning movement of Bertha underneath downtown Seattle has the Washington State Dept. of Transportation optimistic.

The Smart Buildings Center, managed by the nonprofit Northwest Energy Efficiency Council, will use the renovated Pacific Tower as a living laboratory with the goal of improving building performance.