Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
To address the unstable geology of the city, the federal Works Progress
Administration provided funding to the City of Seattle's Engineering De-
partment in the mid-1930s to complete twenty-nine drainage projects.
These projects involved the construction of trenches, tunnels, footings,
and retaining walls to redirect subsurface water fl ows and reduce landslide
incidents.
101
As with other New Deal programs, the drainage projects were
a combination of infrastructure improvement and employment for local
residents; a stipulation of the WPA funding required the municipality to
use unskilled labor and hand tools. Between 1935 and 1941, more than
seven hundred laborers dug an estimated twenty thousand feet of drainage
trenches at a cost of $1 million (see fi gure 5.8).
102
Thomson's Progressive
logic of improving society by improving nature was extended during the
Great Depression through additional public infrastructure projects. The
drainage improvements provided by the WPA funding were not as news-
worthy as other infrastructure projects in the Pacifi c Northwest, such as
the building of the Grand Coulee Dam, but they would serve to further
“invent” the landscape that exists in Seattle today.
The drains continue to function today, and municipal staff members
check them periodically to ensure that they are functioning as designed. A
municipal staff member refl ecting on the WPA-funded work in the 1930s
notes, “God bless the WPA for putting in those drains. But they didn't map
”
”
Figure 5.8
Cross-section of a WPA slide mitigation project in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle
with two vertical interceptor tunnels and a horizontal drainage tunnel, all dug by municipal
laborers with hand tools.
Source
:
Evans 1994.
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