The concerns center on gooseneck fittings common in older homes.
The concerns center on "gooseneck fittings" common in older homes. photosthai/Shutterstock

Seattle Public Utilities Concerned About Lead in Water Pipes: Seattle residents are being asked to "run tap water for two minutes before drinking, if the water hasn’t been used in the last six hours," Capitol Hill Seattle reports. "The temporary precaution comes after tests showed high levels of lead in water lines leading to four Tacoma homes."

Sound Transit Breaks Ground on East Link, Connecting Seattle and the Central District to the Eastside: "The 14-mile route will run from downtown Seattle to Mercer Island and Bellevue, and then to Overlake in Redmond," the Daily Journal of Commerce reports. "Ten transit stations will serve the route."

Highway 520 Will Be Closed This Weekend: "The old State Route 520 floating bridge will close for good Friday night and all traffic will use the new bridge come Monday," KING 5 reports.

WSDOT Apologizes for Tolling Glitch: As many as 8,200 vehicles going across 520 and I-405 were not properly billed, resulting in wrongful late fines, KING 5 reports. (Can we just ban highways already?)

Here are all the things that could go wrong as the Bertha boondoggle moves underneath Highway 99.
Here are all the things that could go wrong as the Bertha boondoggle moves underneath Highway 99. WSDOT

Business Owners Scared the Viaduct Will Collapse on Top of Them: Highway 99 will be closed for two weeks starting one week from today, but the area underneath the highway will remain open, to the puzzlement of some business owners. Bertha is set to finally begin drilling beneath the highway, with its cutterhead coming as close as 15 feet to the viaduct's cement footings. "My instinct says it's a good idea to be closed all the way around," David Bovard, who runs a store underneath the viaduct, told KOMO.

Alaska Airlines Looking Forward to Virgin Takeover: The company believes its first meeting with the Department of Justice, which is assessing the deal, went well, KPLU reports. The Seattle-based airline made a $2.6 billion all-cash offer for Virgin, which raises the question of why it has fought so hard against efforts to raise the minimum wage for its employees.

Ignorant/Transphobic Woman Gets to Go on TV: The BBC reports on Kristi Merritt, a Lakewood woman, who posed in a "string of photographs that compare dressing up as a Mexican, or a pirate, to being transgender" on Facebook. Idiots made her post go viral. She opposes Washington's new common sense rules to ensure that transgender people can use the bathroom the matches their gender identity. Reached for comment by the BBC, a transgender man named Michael Hughes, whose own pro-trans meme went viral, said Merritt is "coming from a place of ignorance." KING 5, on the other hand, bestowed her with two minutes of wholly uncritical airtime.

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Evidence shows that recess improves child development, one UW expert tells KUOW. Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

Should Teachers Be Able to Deny Kids Recess? The Seattle school district gave in to the teachers' union demand for a minimum 30 minutes of recess last fall, but teachers are still able to deny individual children recess as a form of punishment or leverage. KUOW questions whether the practice, which is banned in ten states, is harmful to children.

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