Those Funky Ferries: Run 'em til they sink!
Those funky ferries: Run ‘em til they sink!
Eighty years ago, when my dad was a teenager in California, he routinely crisscrossed San Francisco Bay, frequently riding the ferries Stockton and Redwood Empire – two of the snazzy new boats called “Steel Electrics.”
The year was 1927, the same year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 homers. Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, Henry Ford was rolling the first Model A’s off his Detroit assembly line, and an obscure Austrian corporal named Hitler organized the first Nazi meeting in Berlin.
How time flies. All those guys have been dead for decades. My dad outlasted them all; he died four years ago at the tender age of 92.
But those boats kept right on steaming. They plied the bay for 10 years, until the completion of a couple of big bridges which rendered them obsolete. So the Steel Electrics moved north to Puget Sound, where the Stockton became the Klickitat the Redwood Empire became the Quinault. And they kept on working like Energizer octogenarians, 16 hours a day, 365 days a year, on Puget Sound routes – including our hometown route across Admiralty Inlet to Whidbey Island...
Until this month, when state Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond put her foot down. Enough, she said, is enough. And, oh yeh, have a nice Thanksgiving.
Hey! How can she do that? The Quinault and Klickitat are as much part of the Port Townsend landscape as the Point Wilson Lighthouse, or the courthouse tower. We love the oak and brass trim, the ever-so-nautical portholes, the long, steep staircases. A lot of us even liked the Celtic harp player who entertained upstairs.
The PT-to-Whidbey route is the most scenic on the sound. And, at $2.60 a pop for passengers, it has to be one of the one of the world’s best buys in boat rides.
Or so it was, until Nervous Nellie shut ‘er down.
We’ve all heard the explanations. Inspections reveal “cracks” and “leaks” in those 80-year-old steel plates. A consultant reported 184 fractures in the four vessels, including the Klickitat and Quinault.
It’s enough to make state and Coast Guard officials very, very nervous. Who wants to be in charge when one of those boats breaks up in 60-knot winds and eight-foot waves, and goes to the bottom? Imagine the finger-pointing.
But are those funky old boats at risk of sinking? Not to worry, says Port Townsend’s Carl Allen. And he ought to know. He’s a retired engineer who spent 30 years working the bowels of Washington ferries, the last three of them as chief engineer aboard the 80-year-old Quinault. “Listen,” he says. “The crews know those boats. And trust me, if it’s even close to being unsafe, they’re not going to be out there working.”
Allen made thousands of crossings, and never worried about going down with his ship.
But what about all those cracks and leaks? Allen sighs. It’s a bit misleading, he says, to say the Steel Electrics are 80 years old. They have been rebuilt, repowered, refitted and renewed. The power systems, he says are essentially the same as the modern Mark II jumbo ferries, which have been amazingly reliable, he says.
“They’ve been inspected and updated repeatedly. The power systems are solid. The controls are solid. The steering is solid. The upper cabins are solid....”
And the hulls?
“Yes, there are pinhole leaks scattered through the older parts of the hull,” he says. “It’s not age so much as defects in the steel. Steel boats corrode from the inside out, and it shows up as these pinholes. They’re structurally sound, but mention those pinholes and everybody freaks out.”
But Allen acknowledges that boats have lifetimes, and that the Steel Electrics are reaching the end of theirs. Each trip, each landing, each winter storm adds new stresses to an aging hull.
The Port Townsend-Whidbey crossing is the roughest in the state ferry system. It traverses fierce tidal currents that frequently run against equally fierce winds and seas. The ferries constantly find themselves crossing paths with enormous tankers and freighters. Just docking the boats, especially at the Keystone terminal, requires a skilled boat handler.
What worries him most is the risk of a collision – a freighter or tanker that swerves off course or loses power in Admiralty Inlet. “All the technology can work against you,” he says. “You make things work too smooth and comfortable, and people can get complacent.”
He’s suspicious of last week’s timing. State officials want to replace the boats, and a holiday shutdown could help get the attention of lawmakers.
Ferry officials are stuck. When they proposed to replace the Steel Electrics with larger boats, and to build new terminals to accommodate them, Port Townsend threw something of a civic fit. We like those old boats just the way they are.
“There’s no reason you can’t build new ferries just like the Steel Electrics,” Allen says. “But they want the big boats, interchangeable with the rest of the fleet.”
Allen, for one, predicts the shutdown won’t last very long. The state will inspect those old Steel Electrics, patch the wholes and mend the cracks, and return them to service once they’re sure that lawmakers got the message, he says.
Meanwhile, we need somebody to blame for cutting our floating lifeline to the rest of the world. We can blame state officials for taking the old boats out of service before they had built new boats that meet our civic and aesthetic standards. We can blame the Coast Guard for being overly cautious.
We can blame Tim Eyman and the Tax Revolt for all those state initiatives that cut the taxes that were designated to buy new boats. And we can blame a few million of our neighbors who voted those initiatives into law.
Or we can just stay on our side of the pond, sit back and enjoy it. Does anybody have a good reason to venture over there?
