And the people stayed home

 On my walk yesterday, I saw a few little signs of encouragement around the neighborhood.

And good thing people are staying home, because we have a new problem in West Seattle. A very big problem, although with the pandemic dominating the news, it isn't getting much attention in Seattle at the moment.

Last night at 7 pm, with only a few hours advance notice, the West Seattle high rise bridge was shut down indefinitely.  They found cracks in the concrete where the roadway attaches to the structure. The bridge is closed to all traffic until they can figure out how and when to repair it. Best case scenario is several months.

When the bridge opened in 1984, West Seattle was just a small community, still considered somewhat remote from the rest of the city. At the time, we were amazed at our new bridge. In fact, it looked much too grand. But now the structure is breaking down under a constant load of heavy traffic. Most days, it looks more like a parking lot than a highway. 

The bridge is critical structure for 80,000 of us living on the "peninsula." We use the high rise to get downtown and connect with the freeways.  The low level bridge is not an option, now reserved for emergency vehicles, transit and freight only.  Passenger cars will have to make a long detour south through residential areas to connect with I-5, then head north again to reach downtown Seattle.
A traffic nightmare on top of nightmare.