Wandering around the neighborhood this afternoon, I noticed a number of “bad thing indicator” lights flashing near the Ballard Bridge. And absolutely no traffic going onto or coming off of the bridge. I asked a local businessdude if he knew what was going on. He replied, “No, but it’s been this way for a couple of hours.”
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Back home, I hopped on the Internet to research the situation. What happened? The bridge opened at about 12:45 this afternoon to allow shipping traffic to continue up and/or down the canal. And got stuck. (Thank you, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, via Yahoo! News-Local.) This happens occasionally though, in my experience, not for such a long time.
When I saw it around 2:45, it didn’t look like the bridge decks were stuck in the “up” position. Maybe the bridge closed only mostly—not all of—the way, or maybe it wasn’t fully or reliably operational when I was there.
I thought maybe there had been an accident on the bridge following a brief but intense hail storm around noon:30. The hail was the size of peas. I live on the top (fourth) floor of my apartment building, and with the hail hitting the roof and my stove vent pipe, it was noisy!
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(Second photo: Popcorn kernel on the left, for size comparison.)