A Broadway landowner is worried that his $6 million, 6-story building across the street from the light rail station construction at Broadway and John will come tumbling down when tunneling begins at the site.
KING 5 talked with Franklin Tseng about what he fears will happen to the 1924 retail and apartment building once tunneling begins between the UW station and the site:
He says his engineers predict the building will sink up to three-quarters of an inch.
“If that happens, this building is gone,” said Tseng.
But Sound Transit engineers have also examined the building and its soils and say there is no need for concern.
“The building is going to be safe,” said Sound Transit Spokesman Bruce Gray. “We have monitoring points on that building right now.”
Gray says every building along the line from Capitol Hill to the University District is being monitored with survey equipment that will detect the slightest movement.
Sound Transit’s light rail tunneling work in the city has so far produced nothing quite as catastrophic as Tseng and his Broadway Investment, Ltd. company fear. But that doesn’t mean everything has gone to plan. We reported last year on the risk that light rail tunneling crews will encounter sandy voids within Capitol Hill as they did in Beacon Hill digging.
Tunneling in the project begins from the University of Washington station site near Husky Stadium in 2011 but isn’t planned reach Capitol Hill until sometime in 2012:
Two tunnel boring machines will be launched from the bottom of the station excavation about 1 month apart. The TBM’s will excavate an average of approximately 44 to 50 feet of tunnel per day. As they travel through the earth, the TBM’s also place the concrete rings that form the exterior structure of the tunnel. Dirt from the excavation travels through the machine and onto a conveyance system which brings it back out to the surface to be hauled away.
Meanwhile, on Broadway, a tunnel boring machine will begin working its way from Capitol Hill to downtown:
A single tunnel boring machine (TBM) will be launched from the bottom of the station excavation. The TBM is scheduled to excavate an average of 40 feet of tunnel every day. As it bores through the ground, the TBM will also place the concrete rings that form the exterior surface of the tunnel. Dirt from the excavation travels through the machine and onto a conveyance system which brings it back out to the surface to be hauled away.
When the TBM reaches Pine Street, the TBM will be disassembled and transported back to the Station site, where it will be reassembled to dig the second tunnel between Capitol Hill and Pine Street. The tunneling is done in this direction because there is not sufficient room for all the equipment needed to extract the excavated dirt at Pine Street.
Hope it comes down. A certain Stranger writer with a nasty habit of lying in print lives there. One less hack writer to attack activists.
Wait. You want a major catastrophe just to take out one person from the Stranger?
Sound Transit didn’t predict the sinkholes in Beacon Hill that since occured — and that tunnel was hundreds of feet deep. Yet they think there will be no problems under this brick building when they will tunnel 30 feet under it? Yea. Right.
“The building is going to be safe,” said Sound Transit Spokesman Bruce Gray. “We have monitoring points on that building right now.”
This makes no sense. Just because they have monitoring points does not make it safe. All the monitoring points are going to do is tell us when something starts to fail.
That’s charming…wishing violence (with lots of collateral damage) on a critic. Please, tell me where I can sign up to support your cause!
thirty feet beside it, not under it.
Just another sleaze ball landlord looking for some fast cash.
Well now, if they work, the monitoring points should be active when it falls over!!!
A lot of what Sound Transit has put out is PR.
The building owner has some very legit. concerns. He should keep his attorney in touch with the agency attorney, and if there are problems, file claims at once.
Sound Transit has deep pockets and has funded for such problems.
They will never tell anyone that.
Or I can’t count. Story says 6.
…then how come he hasn’t done crap to maintain or improve the property for his residents?
there is a half story that exists because of the slope of the hill. the top/fifth story is labeled “6.”
frizzelle has the nicest unit in that place! even so there’s no reason to want that charming building to collapse on his account.
because he’s too busy firing good maintenance people and incrementally raising the rents!
…but I have no reason to trust a Sound Transit engineer. Isn’t that akin to the car dealer’s own mechanic telling you the used car is mechanically sound?
For a town where everyone thinks they’re smarter than everyone else, seattle sure has a lot of rubes.
People have been building tunnels in cities for thousands of years. Here In Seattle alone, we have the broad street tunnel, the I-90 tunnels, the metro tunnel, the ST Beacon Hill tunnel, and the granddaddy of them all the Great Northern railroad tunnel.
All of these went in without anything collapsing. This guy us just out for some public money for his crappy old building. Anyone with a lick of sense can see that.