Seattle’s Rotten Sewer System Needs Replacement
City Engineer R.H. Thomson warns that downtown’s decade-old wooden sewers are a 'menace to the roadway' and proposes a major overhaul.
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 board of public works approved yesterday a plan proposed by City Engineer Thomson for improved sewers in the lower part of the city. The report opens by referring to the proposed permanent paving of Front street from Yesler avenue north, and says that to do this before the old box sewers on James street and Yesler avenue are replaced with permanent sewers would leave them a menace to the roadway. Box sewers built about ten years ago are now in a rotten state and liable to collapse, carrying the street down with them, and are so low that high tide backs into them. Mr. Thomson proposes that the construction of the Commercial and Main streets sewers having placed the city in a position to carry out the permanent system, the Cherry street sewer be extended to the new one on Front, replacing the rotten wooden structures with ironstone pipe at a cost of $13,500.
“They are now in a rotten state and liable to collapse, carrying the street down with them.”
Infrastructure maintenance is a perennial challenge in Seattle. Just as City Engineer R.H. Thomson battled the 'rotten' wooden box drains of the 1890s to prepare for modern paving, current city planners are constantly retrofitting and replacing aging pipes under our streets to accommodate growth.
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