{"id":986,"date":"2008-10-09T08:34:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-09T15:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=986"},"modified":"2008-10-09T17:24:48","modified_gmt":"2008-10-10T00:24:48","slug":"your-stuff-and-how-it-got-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/09\/your-stuff-and-how-it-got-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Stuff and How It Got Here"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

\"Cargo<\/a><\/p>\n

The Port of Seattle runs a free tour <\/a>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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Cargo<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n


…read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[259,261,262,258,260],"class_list":["post-986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-seattle","tag-cargo","tag-container-ships","tag-freight","tag-port-of-seattle","tag-shipping","masonry-post","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}