When you ride your bike from downtown to West Seattle, you share the road with train tracks and loaded semi trucks. There’s a fishing pier where you can watch the tugboats tie up and the freight shops coming and going. If you’re unlucky, you can end up on the wrong side of a train and wait a good long time until you can continue on your way. There’s a swing bridge to let large shipping traffic navigate the Duwamish Slough and a drawbridge to let trains go across. There’s a lot going on; drawbridges and semi trucks and the clang of railway warning bells. We have a terrific view of all the industry on harbor island whenever we cross the West Seattle Bridge, but until yesterday, I’d never seen how all those pieces fit together so I can sit at my desk writing this on my fancy flat screen monitor from Korea or China.
The Port of Seattle runs a free tour of the loading and unloading facilities on Harbor Island. They load a group of curious individuals on a big bus, drive you around under the cranes that unload containers from the giant freighter ships onto the backs of trucks – and take them off trucks and put them on freighters. A few miles away, there’s a similar operation that loads and unloads containers from rail cars. We sat transfixed, watching a giant claw slowly lift a container hundreds of feet in the air and place it, oh so gently, onto an empty flat bed rail car.
The port has a guide for each step of the way. As you follow the containers from ship to rail, you learn a bunch of fun facts and numbers that didn’t really stick, though yes, that smell is molasses, and they remove the container doors when shipping Walla Walla sweet onions because the gas emitted by the onions is enough to make the container explode. Business is down 20% because you’re not buying enough cheap stuff from WalMart or Target – there are fewer containers of foreign made goods stacked up waiting to go to Chicago.
I was disappointed but not surprised that we couldn’t get off the bus or go up in the cranes, but I did learn that yes, there’s a bathroom up there and for some reason, all the data from the railway loader is sent to Finland where the cranes are built and yeah, it is kind of like a giant game of Tetris.
It’s too late to get in on the remainder of this year’s tours, but they’ll be running again in the spring. I plan to sign up for as many of them as I can fit in my calendar.
I am a sucker for nerdy “how things work” tours like that. How fondly I remember my peek around an aircraft carrier many years ago when I had a Navy boyfriend.
I hear those containers are occasionally swept into the sea, and beachcombers in the Pacific Northwest find Nike running shoes on the beaches for months. Know anything about that?
That Nike thing was indeed mentioned and yup, you can find shoes on the beaches. Supposedly. I can’t confirm or deny from first person experience, but the tour leader said that it does happen.
What a great idea… I’d never heard about this. I’ll be signing up to take the kids this spring!
Utterly fascinating.
Love the comparison to a real-life version of Tetris.
I’ve lived in Seattle all my life and had no idea the port offered a free tour. Next time the relatives come into town from Atlanta, we’ll have to offer this up as a nice diversion from the routine trips to Pike Place, Snoqualmie Falls, Mt. Rainier etc..
Unbelievable. My brother lived in Bremerton for the past 23 years and we never knew about that tour. I’ve been to all of the major attractions in the multitude of visits to the area, but I would be extremely interested in hitting up a tour next summer when I go there next. I was wondering though: The molasses smell you were talking about would be a good diversion to anything perishable in the warehouse, wouldn’t it? I mean it can’t be completely horrible. Unless of course it’s such a thick smell that it makes tour-goers gag. I mean it’s better than going to the local dump, right? Needless to say, thanks very much for putting this up. I really want to go now!
Nice post, thanks for all the good info.
For your readers who are interested, you can sign up for email updates from the Port of Seattle on future community events.
Just follow the link from the following webpage –
http://www.portseattle.org/news/events/
The port only offers the 101 series during certain times of year, but there are other events that may be of interest, such as Fisherman’s Terminal Fall Festival, the Seattle Maritime Festival or the Port’s Annual Community Meetings (which include a tour of the harbor by Argosy cruise one day and a tour of Sea-Tac Airport the next, both open to the public).