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Topic: Infrastructure

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Airports Owned by Washington's Public Port Districts

Of the nearly 140 public general-aviation airports in Washington state, 35 are operated by port districts, comprising 33 landing fields and two seaplane bases in 29 different port districts dispersed ...

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Alaskan Way Seawall (Seattle)

The ledge of level land on Seattle's central waterfront owes its existence to the Alaskan Way seawall, extending from just north of Broad Street south to Washington Street below Pioneer Square. The so...

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Alaskan Way Viaduct, Part 2: Planning and Design

Congested city streets, a deteriorating waterfront thoroughfare, and vehicle registration rates rising exponentially each year led city officials to begin looking for routes to bypass Seattle's centra...

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Barge Ports on the Columbia and Snake Rivers

For centuries, the Columbia River has been at the center of trade and transportation in the Pacific Northwest. Before the nineteenth century, trade focused on fishing and hunting, and travel was const...

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Bill Newby and Seattle City Light's Skagit Hydroelectric Project, 1935-1996

Bill Newby (b. 1935) was born in the Seattle City Light community of Newhalem on the Skagit River. He worked for City Light starting in 1955 as a laborer, digging ditches. He retired in 1996 as Direct...

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Bonneville Power Administration

The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) was created in 1937 as a temporary agency with a limited mission: to market and distribute electricity from Bonneville Dam, on the Columbia River. Its support...

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Bonneville Power Administration's Richland Substation (Benton County)

When the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) built the Richland Substation in Benton County in 1949, there were only two federally owned hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River -- the Army Corps of...

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Bringing Postal Services to the San Juan Islands

For residents of the San Juan Islands in the late nineteenth century, receiving and sending mail and parcels offered special challenges of distance and isolation. It might be months before a letter po...

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Burlington Northern Overpass (Skagit County)

The Burlington Northern Overpass, originally known as the Great Northern Overpass, was an integral part of U.S. Route 99, the West Coast's main north-south highway during the middle decades of the twe...

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Cedar Creek Bridge (Clark County)

The Cedar Creek Bridge, designated as Clark County's Bridge No. 65 and located at milepost 3.8 on NE Etna Road, was built in 1946, demolished in 2016, and replaced in 2017 by a new bridge. It spans Ce...

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Cedar Falls -- Thumbnail History

Cedar Falls, originally a City Light company town, is located in the upper Cedar River watershed, 30 miles southeast of Seattle. The town's history also encompasses nearby communities that housed rail...

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Chittenden, Hiram Martin (1858-1917)

Hiram Martin Chittenden (1858-1917) spent most of his working life with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where he was involved in the early development of Yellowstone National Park and in navigation,...

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City Light's Birth and Seattle's Early Power Struggles, 1886-1950

City Light, Seattle's publicly owned electric utility, began to take shape in 1902, when voters approved bonds for a hydroelectric dam on the Cedar River. The project, completed in 1905, was a direct ...

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Columbia Basin Project

The Columbia Basin Project (CBP) is the nation's second-largest U.S. Bureau of Reclamation irrigation project. At 670,000 acres under irrigation as of 2021, the project is still unfinished, as more th...

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Columbia Basin Reclamation Project, The Beginnings: A Reminiscence by W. Gale Matthews

In early 1952, W. Gale Matthews -- a resident of Grant County since 1890 and, at the time of this account, President of the Grant County Title Abstract Company -- provided his memories of the beginnin...

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Container Shipping in Seattle: Origins and Early Years

From canoes to container ships, a variety of vessels have carried people and goods between Elliott Bay and the wider world for thousands of years. The introduction of new technologies, such as canoes,...

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Creating the Friday Harbor Water System (San Juan County)

Establishing a water system for the residents of Friday Harbor on San Juan Island was a topic of discussion as soon as the town was incorporated in 1909, but it took five years to complete a system. S...

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Deep-draft Ports of Washington

Of Washington's 75 public port districts, only 11 -- the ports of Seattle, Grays Harbor, Vancouver, Everett, Tacoma, Bellingham, Kalama, Longview, Olympia, Port Angeles, and Anacortes -- have deep-dra...

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Denny Regrade (Seattle)

Few changes to the Seattle landscape were as epic as the regrading of Denny Hill, which took place between 1897 and 1930 and involved five separate projects. Located between downtown and Queen Anne Hi...

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Elevated Transportation Company: Extending the Monorail (Seattle)

The Elevated Transportation Company (ETC) was created by Initiative 41 on November 4, 1997. In that initiative, a 53 percent majority of Seattle voters called for construction of a 40-mile elevated sy...

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Ellensburg Substation (Kittitas County)

The substation designed and built by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) at Ellensburg in Central Washington brought low-cost electricity to the city and surrounding Kittitas County following it...

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Emmett Watson on Jim Ellis

A lawyer by trade, Jim Ellis (1921-2019) was a civic activist who helped transform Seattle into one of America's great cities. One of his contemporaries was Emmett Watson (1918-2001), a Seattle newspa...

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Enloe Dam (Okanogan County)

Enloe Dam represents an early effort to harness the power of the Similkameen River in Okanogan County. Built in 1919-1920 by the D. J. Broderick Company, with engineering by C. F. Uhden, the dam ...

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Fishermen's Terminal (Seattle)

Fishermen's Terminal on Seattle's Salmon Bay has served as the home port for the Puget Sound-based fishing fleet since it opened in 1914. The Port of Seattle developed the site soon after King County ...

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