Original West Seattle Bridge & Ship Incident
At 2:38 a.m. on June 11, 1978, the freighter Chavez rammed the West Seattle Bridge over the Duwamish West Waterway, thereby closing it to automobile traffic for the next six years.
The Chavez was 550 feet long and was carrying 20,000 tons of gypsum under the command of 80-year-old Puget Sound Pilot Rolf Neslund (1897-1980) and its master, Gojko Gospodnetic, when, just before dawn, it struck the east end of the bridge. A Coast Guard board of inquiry found both officers negligent. Neslund retired two weeks after the accident. Gospodnetic, a Yugoslav national, was fired.
Two years later, Neslund's wife murdered him on Lopez Island, later claiming that he had returned to Norway. Although no trace of the body was ever found, she was convicted of the crime and died in prison.
The accident had one positive result: It ended years of debate over a new West Seattle Bridge, particularly a high bridge to accommodate Port of Seattle plans for expanded use of the Duwamish Waterway. The previous effort to build a bridge collapsed in 1975 amid a kickback scandal that sent the City Engineer to prison.
After the accident, Mayor Charles Royer (b. 1939) and City Councilmember Jeanette Williams (1914-2008) enlisted the aid of U.S. Senator Warren G. Magnuson (1905-1989) to secure federal funds and the participation of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as project manager for the high-level bridge. The new span was dedicated on July 14, 1984, at a cost of $150 million including $60 million in federal money. A new pivot-wing bridge later replaced the original bascule bridge.
Read more about this topic: West Seattle Bridge
Famous quotes containing the words original, west, seattle, bridge, ship and/or incident:
“The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage ... he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or humor or affection.”
—Elizabeth Drew (1887–1965)
“Humanism, it seems, is almost impossible in America where material progress is part of the national romance whereas in Europe such progress is relished because it feels nice.”
—Paul West (b. 1930)
“I once heard of a murderer who propped his two victims up against a chess board in sporting attitudes and was able to get as far as Seattle before his crime was discovered.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“I was at work that morning. Someone came riding like mad
Over the bridge and up the road—Farmer Rouf’s little lad.
Bareback he rode; he had no hat; he hardly stopped to say,
“Morgan’s men are coming, Frau, they’re galloping on this way.”
—Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894)
“Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)