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May 26, 2016

Bertha kept on digging during outage, but lots of other projects were stopped

Yesterday's massive power outage in downtown Seattle had many people wondering if Bertha, the machine digging the replacement tunnel for the Alaskan Way Viaduct, was to blame.

Bertha was not the culprit in this case — Seattle City Light traced the problem to a substation on Massachusetts Street that affected the Union Substation that feeds electricity to downtown. A breaker failed at Massachusetts, and City Light is investigating the cause.

While downtown was powerless, Bertha kept chugging away because the massive machine has its own power supply and backup generator. The machine is digging near Commuter Centre garage on Western Avenue and Columbia Street.

Other construction sites in the affected area weren't so lucky.

At the 16-story Cyrene apartment project under construction at Western Avenue and University Street, dozens of construction workers gathered at Harbor Steps, many eating their lunches. It was unclear if the outage, which began around 11:30 a.m., was during their normal lunch time.

A couple of projects being built by Sellen Construction were inside the outage zone, which stretched from Elliott Bay to Interstate 5 and from Pike Street to the north and South Jackson Street to the south.

Sellen's affected projects were the Pike Place Market expansion and the 36-story Madison Centre tower for Schnitzer West and Cornerstone Real Estate Advisers.

A spokeswoman for Sellen said the outage didn't materially impact the two projects. She said workers kept going, but shifted to other tasks in some cases. No one got stuck on personnel lifts.

Sellen's tower cranes are not self-powered, so they were out of service for the duration of the outage, about an hour.

Another project under construction in the outage zone is The Mark, an office and hotel tower by Daniels Real Estate.

Managers from JTM Construction, the contractor building The Mark, didn't respond to emails but Kevin Daniels talked by phone from New York City.

Daniels said he hadn't heard about the power outage. He said the tower crane runs on its own power, but personnel hoists would have been affected.

The outage shut down about 12,000 meters, which is about 60 percent of downtown. A City Light news release says the Seattle Fire Department performed 15 elevator rescues during that time.

The outage turned intersections into parking lots, and disrupted transit throughout the city. Traffic signals downtown were not functioning during the outage.

The outage affected people using Sound Transit's rail system. The agency reported that light rail was temporarily out of service.

Sea-Tac airport did not lose power, but some landline phones were down, according to a tweet by Sea-Tac Airport.

This report includes material from the Associated Press.




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