The Ghost Safe of the Waterfront
A decade after a deadly landslide, amateur divers still hunt for a Northern Pacific warehouse safe lost to the tides.
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.
Another attempt was made yesterday by an amateur diver to locate the safe lost from the Northern Pacific warehouse during a landslide years ago. Many attempts have been made to recover the box, which reportedly contained thousands of dollars. Previous efforts, including those by Bob Harrison and William Baldwin, failed. Baldwin was a noted marine engineer who spent weeks probing the bay floor with a steel rod, famously once recovering the remains of a night watchman who perished in the slide. Baldwin eventually died after a mechanical failure in his diving gear. Many believe the safe has shifted with the wreckage into deep water where it can never be recovered.
“Many claim that the safe has slid out with the wreckage and dropped off into the bay where the water is so deep that it can probably never be recovered.”
Tacoma’s geography has always been defined by its unstable waterfront and industrial hazards. This story captures the city's obsession with its own history of disaster and the persistent, often dangerous, lure of lost wealth in the deep waters of the bay.
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