FEDERAL WAY, Wash. — Sitting alongside the Interstate 5 corridor is one of Sound Transit’s efforts to improve travel through Puget Sound: a 7.8-mile-long extension linking downtown Seattle and Federal Way.
The Federal Way link extension will cut travel time from downtown Federal Way to SeaTac to 15 minutes, and getting from Federal Way to Seattle would take 46 minutes, according to Sound Transit.
However the agency ran into a problem: the soil underneath one of the sections is unstable.
Michael Jellison, construction manager for Sound Transit, said it was critical to make adjustments before it was too late.
“If we would’ve gone forward with the originally designed intent we had for this area, we could have piers and columns in areas that’re unsuitable,” he said. “Structurally we could have a huge, catastrophic failure.”
Now Sound Transit has come up with a workaround: an 1,100-foot-long bridge that goes over the 500-foot span of unstable soil, built to withstand any seismic disruptions.
Building this infrastructure is critical to help people move around the region and is long overdue, Jellison said.
“We’re way behind as far as transit goes throughout the United States and this area,” he said. “Getting these on the books, getting them built, being timely with them and responsible with the taxpayers’ money throughout these entire systems here is our responsibility.”
The total link extension was due to be finished by the end of the year, but this new construction pushes the extension’s completion date to 2026.
The cost of the bridge is around $72 million. That money was included in the extension’s overall $2.4 billion budget when it was approved in 2018, so the bridge won’t come with any additional costs, according to Sound Transit.
Meanwhile, Jellison promises the extension will be worth the wait.
“We’re going to produce an extremely high quality project, and product that lasts for generations to come,” he said. “Your kids, their kids, are going to be able to use this transit line throughout their lives.”
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