The first thing that came to my mind while walking the length of the waterfront between the viaduct and Elliott Bay the other day was the Department of Homeland Security terror drill that happened in Sodo in 2003. The theater of post-9/11 mayhem on the streets of Seattle, with bloody bodies, burning buses, bashed cars, and emergency professionals in protective gear that made them look like spacemen among the ruins of a dirty-bombed city—those images blend in effortlessly with the mayhem on the waterfront right now. Not only is there Bertha and all that surrounds it, there is also the Elliott Bay Seawall Project simultaneously under way, the $330 million replacement of our 100-year-old seawall. Our old seawall was made of landfill, concrete, and the remains of 20,000 trees, and the project right now appears as debris of tree trunks, muddy pools of water, concrete rubble, and rising dust. This is a moment when the productive activities of construction resemble the chaos of destruction…
