Lucky indeed this week the Seattle attorney who had no depositions -- or, even more -- court hearings scheduled for Bellingham. Bellingham, the county seat of Whatcom county (a county that hangs off the Canadian border), is a fair-sized city, and one that generates a fair amount of litigation not only for its own attorneys, but also for attorneys in Seattle.
The drive to Bellingham, up I-5, is a pleasant drive that takes about an hour and a half. Time enough to compose your thoughts, or compose your oral argument. Time to get out of the office, enjoy the scenery, and bill easy time to your client.
But not this week. A week ago Thursday, as the entire nation now knows, a segment of the bridge spanning the Skagit river between Mount Vernon and Burlington came tumbling down. The 70,000 vehicles that use the bridge daily were being re-routed onto city streets across smaller bridges. It was not a pretty experience, as I understand it.
I have crossed the Skagit bridge innumerable times. Never gave the bridge much of a thought. It's possible to drive for an hour or so on today's freeways with no thought at all about the infrastructure that permits your driving hypnosis, that vacant stare as you follow the lane markers mile after mile on a smooth ribbon of roadway. Unless the scenery is spectacular, or the bridge unusual, you hardly notice that at times you are driving a hundred feet or so off the surface of land or water.
Until a girder gives way, a bridge is down, and you find yourself staring down at water flowing past.
Luckily, and amazingly, no one was seriously hurt by the collapse, despite several cars' being dropped into the river, but the impact on economics and personal convenience has been far more serious. For harried folks, like Seattle attorneys, who just have to reach Bellingham, Amtrak has temporarily added another train in each direction between the two cities. A solution is not so easy for merchants in the area who depend on the freeway to deliver customers to their shopping centers. Motorists poking along, bumper to bumper, have shown little interest in pulling out of line to do a little shopping.
Supposedly, the bridge will be sufficiently patched up to permit freeway traffic in another two or three weeks. Meanwhile, we learn once again how our vaunted "self-sufficiency" as individuals depends on the reliability of an infrastructure on which many others have worked together, working to create and maintain it for our convenience.
No comments:
Post a Comment