Shoreline author documents building of Highway 99 tunnel

SHORELINE — Ten years ago the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine tripped over a steel pipe and stalled.

Catherine Bassetti remembers the day. December 6, 2013.

“Bertha stopped and my dad died,” Bassetti said of the two unrelated but haunting events.

Bertha, as the machine had been christened, had been deployed to burrow a tunnel from Seattle’s SoDo district to South Lake Union that would replace the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct. A mere 1,000 feet into its two-mile journey, it struck an 8-inch pipe.

Bassetti was there. The Shoreline resident was the official photographer for Seattle Tunnel Partners, a pair of private companies hired to dig the tunnel.

Over the next five years, Bassetti would visit the construction site to take thousands of photos and videos.

The images became the basis for her book, “Building Seattle’s State Route 99 Supertunnel: Journey from Light to Light,” self-published in 2020.

“My hope is that readers can sense the magnitude of dedicated labor and engineering that built Seattle’s new tunnel,” Bassetti said.

To tell the tunnel’s story, Bassetti interviewed dozens of workers and illustrated their words with hundreds of her photos.

“This book came to life as they shared their own experiences on the job,” Bassetti said.

Her own backstory, however, didn’t make the book’s pages.

Circus Days

Some of Bassetti’s most arresting photos were taken from the “man basket,” a steel cage suspended high above the viaduct on a steel cable. Used to lift workers in and out of a 120-foot deep access pit, it became one of her prime vantage points.

“You had to hold on,” she said. “I didn’t get dizzy but it would wave around in the wind.”

Swaying high above the ground was nothing new for the intrepid photographer. In her early 20s, Bassetti, who grew up in Bellevue, joined the circus on a whim after it played the Seattle Coliseum, now KeyArena.

Smitten, she climbed aboard the train carrying the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and criss-crossed the country for three years. She sold souvenirs at first, but then she was invited to become an aerial ballerina. A troupe of 40 women would gracefully pirouette on ropes rigged 30 feet above the floor, a leather wrist strap the only safety feature.

“There was no net,” Bassetti said.

The experience erased her fear of heights, which would serve her well as she dangled high above Seattle’s skyline with her camera at her side.

It also changed the trajectory of her life. She traveled. She took up photography. She earned a bachelor’s degree in filmmaking from Antioch University in Ohio.

“The message is take the risk, take the leap of faith, ” Bassetti said.

Riding high above the city, Bassetti sometimes caught sight of the buildings her father had designed and saved.

Her father, the late Fred Bassetti, was a well-known Seattle architect whose portfolio included the Seattle Municipal Tower and the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building. In the 1970s, he lobbied to save the Pike Place Market from the wrecking ball.

Big Bertha

Bertha — named for Bertha Knight Landes, Seattle’s first female mayor — boasted a cutter head 58 feet across.

Justyn Workman, a night shift worker on the site, had heard he was in for a big project. But he told Bassetti he didn’t fully understand how gigantic it was “until my first time underground. It was like a five-story building digging sideways underneath Seattle!”

No ordinary excavator, Bertha munched through rock and soil, carried the debris away on a conveyor belt and installed concrete panels that formed the tunnel walls.

The enormous machine was designed to till the earth at a rate of 35 feet per day. Like the Titanic, nothing could stop it — or so its engineers thought.

Then the drill head hit something large — a boulder or an old locomotive or a buried ship — and the gigantic machine overheated and ground to a halt. The culprit turned out to be a section of steel pipe but that mystery wouldn’t be solved until 2017.

Tunnel construction ceased while workers built an access pit to repair the machine. Another two years would pass before Bertha resumed her underground journey. In the meantime, skeptical Seattleites wondered if the project would ever be completed.

Those who knew Bertha personally begged to differ.

“For those of us on the Seattle Tunnel Partners team, we never had any doubt that Bertha would resume tunneling and that the project would be successfully accomplished,” Chris Dixon, a project manager, told Bassetti.

The idea for a book took hold in 2018 after Bassetti gave a tunnel talk at the Museum of History and Industry. A crowd turned out, she said.

For years, the public only heard negative news and political banter about the project, Bassetti said. Only a handful of “tunnel geeks” knew another version, including grueling around-the-clock work and the immense effort expended by all the teams involved.

“By getting to know the crew, I was able to access what no one else could,” Bassetti said.

But the publishers she contacted had little interest in the tunnel’s history. Undeterred, she wrote and published the book on her own dime.

Life underground

But the star of Bassetti’s book is, of course, Bertha — and her attendants: the engineers, managers, carpenters, welders and crane workers who steered the project.

Cody Heck was a compressed air worker, part of the “dive” team that descended 120 feet into the pit to clean or change the cutter head’s enormous teeth. Due to the pressure at that depth, similar to an underwater dive, workers could only be underground for about 90 minutes.

“It was cold and muddy out there. Even though you couldn’t see too far below, you knew it was 60 feet down,” Heck told Bassetti. “When something like a piece of rock fell, you could definitely hear it hit the water way down there.”

When Lisa Miller, the project’s senior site administrator, got married inside the tunnel’s south entrance in 2015, Bassetti was the wedding photographer.

“My mom, my best friend Melinda, and I were lowered 90 feet to the bottom in a man cage,” Miller told Bassetti. “Our hard hats were trimmed in pearls and lace. My sweetie met us at the bottom.”

On April 7, 2017, Bertha made her exit from the tunnel at last.

“The grinding could be heard behind the wall of pilings…. at 9:30 a.m, a sharp blast rang out; water gushed from the ground level into the shaft,” Bassetti wrote in her book. “Smoke and dust billowed up and out to the surrounding area.”

“Bertha broke through and was visible as the dust cleared. The elated shouts and whistles of the crew from within the machine marked the end of Bertha’s arduous and triumphant journey,” Bassetti wrote.

All told, 1.2 million tons of debris were mined and barged away during Bertha’s four-year journey.

On February 2, 2019, the tunnel opened and the 65-year-old Alaskan Way Viaduct finally closed.

“People may have negative things to say about the tunnel project, but I’m proud to say I was there, that I helped build it,” Workman said. “Sure, it took longer than expected, but I wouldn’t change the experience, knowledge and friendships I gained. I’d do it all again.”

“Bertha broke down. We took it out of the ground, we fixed it, put it back, and slowly but surely we made it to the end,” Marcel Ouedraogo, a mechanical welder and operating engineer, told Bassetti.

“That’s what happens when people get together as a team to build the country. And it’s a blessing. It’s not a chance, it’s a blessing,” Ouedraogo said.

Bassetti, who was there to capture all that hard work the whole way through, felt the sense of accomplishment too by the end.

“It was hard, dangerous, challenging work,” Bassetti said. “It was one of the most satisfying assignments of my career. I’m proud of this book.”

Janice Podsada: 425-339-3097; jpodsada@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @JanicePods.

For more information go to www.thesupertunnel.com/

Sound & Summit

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