Tragedy on the Sound Shoreline
A fatal landslide on the Great Northern coast line buries a railway laborer alive, highlighting the recurring peril of unstable terrain along the Puget Sound.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The first fatal accident resulting from the slides on the shore line of the Great Northern road occurred between 12 and 1 o'clock yesterday morning. A gang of laborers went down from Everett on a hand car about midnight to clear debris when they heard a warning rumble. Charles Rode and Frank Kelly jumped over the bulkheading into the Sound. A second slide pushed them further out under logs, where they were eventually rescued by the tug Kettle S. A subsequent slide buried Robert Baker and the hand car, covering 850 feet of track to a depth of 25 to 40 feet. Baker’s body had not been recovered at the time of reporting. The entire overhanging bluff seems to be slipping forward like ice from a glacier, undermining the tracks and forcing the company to repeatedly move the roadbed.
“The whole of the great overhanging bluff seems to be slipping forward and breaking off like the ice from a glacier.”
The precarious nature of the rail line along the Puget Sound bluffs remains a major engineering and safety challenge for modern Amtrak Cascades and BNSF rail operations, echoing the same geological instability that plagued the Great Northern Railway in the 1890s.
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