Mayor Durkan decides on repairing West Seattle Bridge instead of immediate replacement

This morning Mayor Durkan announced that the city will move forward with repairing the cracked main span of the West Seattle Bridge, with the expectation that it will reopen by mid-2022, restore the bridge to its original expected lifetime, and push out building a replacement for up to 40 years. However, she also said that SDOT will start studying an eventual replacement strategy now, and it will approach Sound Transit about jointly building a third span to West Seattle that could incorporate light rail, bicycles and pedestrians.

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West Seattle Bridge cost-benefit analysis released, and the options are clear (even if the report isn’t)

Today SDOT finally released the long-awaited “cost-benefit analysis” on the various options for repair or replacement of the West Seattle Bridge. It’s 89 pages, it’s dense, and it wins the award for “worst executive summary.” SDOT had to publish a “reader’s guide” today to help people make sense of it. But in the end it tells us what we need to know in order to decide whether we should repair or replace the bridge. Here’s what it says.

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SDOT publishes analysis of “modes of failure” for West Seattle Bridge

Last week SDOT released a consulting engineer’s report that answers the question, “if the West Seattle Bridge were to fail, how exactly would it fail?” The department asked the question to help it plan for emergency procedures — including an evacuation of nearby areas — if it determined that a failure were imminent. While a failure of the West Seattle Bridge would likely not be quite the spectacle that the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was, according to the engineers’ analysis it would still be a sight.

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