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When a Freighter Broke a City: The Night West Seattle Lost Its Bridge
When a Freighter Broke a City: The Night West Seattle Lost Its Bridge
The city that felt marooned suddenly had its connection severed at 2:38 a.m. on June 11, 1978, when the freighter Chavez drove its bow into the West Spokane Street Bridge and jammed the bascule spans open forever - and no one died. How did a decades-old, bribery-plagued infrastructure problem turn into the exact catastrophe a federal official once joked would finally free the money to replace it?
In this episode, we tell the sequence of events from the bridge’s origins around 1900 through the 1968 Forward Thrust funding…
The skinny
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