<p>Tunnel Repair Rattles Seattle Residents
SEATTLE — Dec 11, 2014, 7:19 PM ET
By MARTHA BELLISLE Associated Press
Each time Mike Petrone wrestles the newly stuck door open and heads to the basement
underneath J&M Cafe in Seattle's historic Pioneer Square, he finds a new crack, a new
leak, deeper sinking of a concrete walkway.
"That doubled in size in the past three or four months," Petrone said, pointing to a diagonal
crack running up one of the basement's outside walls. "The floor used to be level - six
months ago it was level - but now it sinks in the center. And now water drips from the
ceiling."
J&M Cafe, established in 1889 to serve Gold Rush prospectors, sits a few blocks away from
a giant access pit being dug so crews working to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct can
reach a broken-down tunneling machine. When they began pulling water out of deep wells
under the pit to lessen the pressure, a monitoring system detected about 1 inch of ground
sinking in the area that included the saloon, Todd Trepanier, the state transportation
department's viaduct program administrator, told the City Council.
"We don't like an inch," Trepanier told the council, but quickly added that it appeared to be
uniform and stable and no threat to the safety of the State Route 99 bridge the tunnel aims
to replace.
After the 61-year-old viaduct suffered damage in a 2001 earthquake, city and state officials
agreed on a plan to move the highway underneath the city and open up the waterfront. The
tunneling machine, known as Bertha, began drilling last year but broke down in December
2013. Engineers came up with a plan to fix the machine by digging a 120-foot pit in front of
Bertha so it could be pulled out. They'd dug about 83 feet before ground monitors detected
settlement.
The sinking soil prompted new surveys and inspections of the viaduct and buildings along
Alaskan Way and Pioneer Square. Engineers hope to determine whether the deep de-
watering and ground settlement are linked. Trepanier said the timing suggested a cau