To my many Blog fans (both of you) who had thought that I had died; I haven't.
An interesting Real Estate/Engineering event took place a few weeks ago. My wife and I attended a presentation at a University of Washington Civil Engineering facility about the building of the newest (3rd) Tacoma Narrows Bridge. It was a one and one half hour Power Point presentation made jointly by Joe Mahoney, a Civil Engineering Professor and the Program Manager, Steve Hansen from the primary builder (Peter Kiewit). It described how this (almost) seven year long project was accomplished in very understandable, laymen's terminology using many photos and charts. With my "engineering hat" on I enjoyed every morsel of the presentation. Among the many interesting facts was that enough cable was used to circle the world twice. However one of the most wonderful parts of the story was the safety record; no deaths and only five lost time accidents. If you had driven across the older bridge as often as we had during the construction period and had seen the conditions the men worked under (heights/winds/cold) you wouldn't have believed it possible.
It dawned on me later that I may be one of very few that has seen all three bridges in his lifetime. In 1940 when "Galluping Gurtie" was but a few months old my father drove our family from our home in Bremerton to Gig Harbor to watch this two lane bridge sway in the wind. I was not present that fateful November day when it blew down but I am sure most of have seen the film clip documenting the event.
The second bridge, completed in 1953 was a four lane bridge, the only one in use until the new one was completed this summer. With the addition of the new bridge we now have four lanes Westbound (old bridge) and four plus lanes Eastbound (new bridge).
For those of us living in the Puget Sound area the commute from "the Peninsula" to Tacoma, then on to I-5 is a relative breeze. The routine, big backups that we had experienced during commute hours over the last several years are now a thing of the past.
Putting my "Real Estate hat" on I see an even greater increase in the number of people moving west to the Olympic Peninsula in the future. This is due to the relative ease of using the bridge(s) as compared to the (sometimes unreliable) Puget Sound ferry system.
As one might expect there is a (personal) down side to this whole saga. We have lost what we locals used to think was our well kept little secret. That was the fact we had been lucky enough to live in a relatively untouched part of the world we had fondly referred to as "God's Country". That belief, I am sorry to say, will soon be a thing of the past.
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