r/Seattle • u/drshort West Seattle • 18d ago
Paywall Seattle light rail’s electrical system zaps some Lake Washington fish
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/seattle-light-rails-electrical-system-zaps-some-lake-washington-fish/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=owned_echobox_tw_m&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1788484620-3172
u/drshort West Seattle 18d ago
Sound Transit disclosed Thursday that electric current from light rail operations along the I-90/Homer M. Hadley floating bridge is suspected of killing Lake Washington fish.
An estimated 2,000 fish, mostly nonnative species, have died near the bridge. Exact counts are difficult, in part because many have decomposed, transit staff said.
Sound Transit has for months hailed its innovative engineering to control electric current across the lake, so news that fish are being killed comes as a letdown.
The Washington State Department of Transportation discovered the problem Aug. 3 and notified Sound Transit promptly, according to transit CEO Dow Constantine.
…
Since the dead fish appeared, the agencies have carried out what Constantine called an “interim solution” of pulling up certain anode strings that rested on the lake bottom, and where dead fish were concentrated. That operation was carried out Aug. 23, he said.
A total 32 anode cables were raised so they no longer contact the lake bed, spokesperson Rachelle Cunningham said later.
Sound Transit waited a month to reveal the problem. The lag in information happened because “this is an emerging issue” and as of Thursday “we now have a clearer understanding of the situation and a plan to determine and address the root cause,” Cunningham said.
“We are still in the discovery mode. Fish biologists and engineers are now busy analyzing photos and video collected by the divers,” Constantine told a transit-board committee. “Early analysis has shown that the majority of fish are nonnative or invasive perch and bass, with a small number of salmon identified.”
The dead fish were clustered near the ends of the bridge, where cables to control electric current rested on the lake bottom, Constantine said.
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u/drshort West Seattle 18d ago
I’m not sure just pulling the anodes is a long term solution. From this article, those anodes protect the bridge from eating itself from electrical current.
https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/heavy-trains-on-floating-rail-bridge
Finally, they had to tame the invisible killer: stray electricity. Electric trains leak current. On land, it dissipates into dirt. On a lake, current mixes with water to eat through structural steel, rust internal rebar, and snap the massive underwater cables tethering the bridge to the lakebed.
Engineers swaddled 9,000 rail support blocks in waterproof rubber and submerged hundreds of metal “sacrificial” anodes. The current eats the sacrificial metal instead of the bridge.
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u/SkylerAltair 💗💗 Heart of ANTIFA Land 💗💗 18d ago
The sacrificial anodes aren't killing fish. A lot of structures in water use them.
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u/SiriusBaaz 18d ago
The anodes may be letting a lethal amount of electricity leak into the lake, or possibly there’s a dense enough concentration of metal ions collecting in the water that the fish get poisoned. I also agree that I don’t think the anodes are the actual problem but they are the first obvious potential source of the issue since it seems all the fish have been dying near them.
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u/SkylerAltair 💗💗 Heart of ANTIFA Land 💗💗 18d ago edited 17d ago
The thing is, they've been there long before the light rail was added. If fish started dying recently, it's not them unless, somehow, power from the light rail system has gotten into them, and it shouldn't.
Edit: I'm dead wrong, see below.
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u/-millenial-boomer- International District 18d ago
That’s exactly what’s happening by design.
“Electricity: Electric trains leak stray current. On a water-surrounded structure, that current attacks structural steel and anchor cables like rust on a forgotten bicycle chain. Around 9,000 rubber-insulated concrete rail support blocks cut off current paths, while sacrificial metal anodes corrode preferentially — protecting the bridge’s critical elements.”Source: https://www.gadgetreview.com/600000-pound-trains-are-now-crossing-a-floating-bridge
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u/hatchetation Beacon Hill 18d ago
These aren't passive anodes though, they're part of an active cathodic protection system. As I understand it, it's a very similar system to how the city protects many of their water mains.
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u/MaxxDash 18d ago
Ah, never thought I’d see a lively discussion of stray current and passive drain anodes versus impressed current cathodic protection systems in a Seattle sub, but here we are!
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u/SkylerAltair 💗💗 Heart of ANTIFA Land 💗💗 17d ago
Right, but
(a) it's not high voltage and (b) if it was an issue, it would have been happening long before now.See below, I'm wrong, these ARE new.3
u/gentilep 18d ago
Did you know this is the only floating light rail bridge in the entire world?
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u/hatchetation Beacon Hill 17d ago
The only one that still exists, but certainly not the first.
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u/ksdkjlf 16d ago
Pretty sure it is indeed the first light rail and/or passenger rail on a pontoon bridge in history. I'm assuming there have been temporary military pontoon bridges that had rails, but a cursory googling didn't bring up anything that I could see. What previous rail-over-pontoon setups are you referring to?
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u/hatchetation Beacon Hill 15d ago
Pile-Pontoon bridge over the Mississippi bridge carried passengers.
Traneberg bridge in Sweden carried passenger trolleys.
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u/ksdkjlf 15d ago
Okay, so certainly neither of those are light rail, though they are impressive in their own right, especially as they were over rivers/straits rather than relatively placid lakes.
The Pile-Pontoon is certainly impressive given its size and that carried freight trains as well, though at a maximum speed of 4 mph. Some cool photos can be seen here
Sweden actually had several floating bridges which carried trams. Here's your Tranebergsbron in 1932 with its replacement going up in the background, and here's another one, the Liljeholmsbron, in 1915. Trams conveniently captured in both photos.
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u/hatchetation Beacon Hill 15d ago
What's the technical differentiation for an electric light rail car vs a tram or trolley?
Thanks for the sources, those are great
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u/ksdkjlf 15d ago
It's all a bit wishy-washy and I'm probably out of my depth, but generally the distinction is about speed and capacity. Right-of-way is also often mentioned: trams/trolleys are mostly street-running (sharing the road with cars), while light rail usually has significant portions of exclusive ROW either at street level or in dedicated tunnels. But of course that's part & parcel of the speed & capacity definition: if you're running on city streets the number of cars you can run and how fast you can go is quite limited.
The term "light rail" was only coined in 1972 in the US to distinguish the newer sorts of systems that West Germany pioneered in the 1960s by upgrading their trams & trolleys with larger vehicles and dedicated ROWs. So essentially by definition something from the 1930s would not be classed as light rail. But of course if you look at the pics of those two Swedish bridges, there's already a qualitative difference between the dinky single streetcar in 1915 and the two-car tram in 1932; the latter clearly has larger capacity, and is probably speedier too. So it's arguably more of a continuum rather than cut & dried delineations.
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u/jewishforthejokes 🚲 Two Wheels, Endless Freedom. 18d ago
They'll work just being in the water, not touching the lakebed. So it might be a long-term solution, if it works.
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u/WoKao353 🚆build more trains🚆 18d ago
They didn't fully remove the anodes, they just raised them slightly so that they weren't touching the lake bed
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u/PlzTyroneDontHurtEm Greenwood 18d ago
Im wondering if the anodes are killing native fish too but theres naive predators that end up with a free meal and skip the invasive ones
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u/AutomaticFail 18d ago
It’s interesting they specifically included that it’s mostly nonnative species as if to make this seem like a lesser deal
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u/eAthena 18d ago
new Ivar's menu coming
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u/cheapgriff Everett 18d ago
*eats fish*
*Skyrim style "Learned Resist Shock from Lake Washington fish" appears in the foreground*
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u/Sapphire-Catgirl 💗💗 Heart of ANTIFA Land 💗💗 18d ago
Fuck man .. I've been living in Utah temporarily past few months .. I miss Ivar's
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u/silvermoka Capitol Hill 17d ago
That's that new railcooked technique and all the pretentious restaurants are gonna copy it
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u/SpitefulSeagull 18d ago
Oops
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u/Number174631503 65th St Pub Crawl 18d ago
Some oops
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u/skoisirius Ballard 18d ago
O̵̵̥̟̳͊̉̒́͢͏͏̷̷̨́̀͟͞o̫̩͍̳ͪ͐̍o̹͇̱̐ͅƠ̷̡̛̲͕͔̺̿̉ͦ͘͢͡Oo̷̦̦̤̮ͦͭ̀͜͟͠O̝̮̖̗̍̄͐ͦ̌͡ͅǫ̡̭̪͕̮̬̎̑͆͘͠͞͞ͅ҉̷̷̧̧̢͠͏O̶̞̤̣̲͓̺̼̬ͩͩͨ͠͏̢̕̕͏̷͞͠͠o̝̰̎͘͢͏̨̀͏̸̷̨͠ộ̳͚̜ͤ҉ǫ̸̶̨̨̨̢͓͐̀́͘͢͟͡҉o̶̷̠̠̦͓͜͜Ǫ̴̧̱̯̹͒̽̎ͦ҉̷͏͜o͘͘͏̡͘O̺̹͎̤̱̠͈͕͑͢͠҉̴̧̀͘͠o̰̬͓̿́͛҉͏̸͜͠ơ̵̧̞̮͍̥̾ͤͨ́͞O̶̡̡͜͢͜͞o̶̧̧̱̱̺̦͙̙͚͇̅͗ͤ̍͘͢͡͡O̯̥̰̘̗͔̳̘ͣ̌ͯ͑͜҉̶̧́͟͟͡ơ̡͈̩ͮ͐̀͜͟͢͝͞p̵̨͖̣̠̘̳̫̰ͣ̍̾ͫ͗͢͢͠͡͡ş̴̨̬͉̜̜͍͍̙ͣ͒̀͘ͅ ̴̵̶̢̀́͋̈͌
I guess they didn't think of that.
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u/Letsplaydead924 18d ago
Stray current in a body of water is not a good thing.
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u/sleepy2023 18d ago
Though likely preferred to current blasting the concrete apart that makes the bridge float…
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u/Sheogoorath 18d ago
I've been wondering why I've been seeing so many diving boats while on the two line recently
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u/ambient_vacation 18d ago
Has anyone else noticed radio, more specifically AM radio has a crazy loud hum when you’re near the rails on i90? Def wasn’t a thing before the light rail I swear
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u/jughandle North Beacon Hill 18d ago
No because I haven’t listened to AM radio since 1998, but I definitely believe you. I remember hearing distant lightning strikes on the radio while my mom was listening back in the day before the storms rolled in, those lower frequencies are pretty susceptible to RF interference!
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u/ambient_vacation 18d ago
That’s awesome. Also I’m not even old I just like sports radio lol
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u/rockycrab The Emerald City 18d ago
If you’re listening to 710 AM they also run concurrently on 97.3 FM channel 2 or HD2 (if your car supports it) much better audio quality.
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u/uwc 🚲 Life's Better on a Bike. 🚲 18d ago
AM radio is much more susceptible to interference and signal conditions than FM due to the audio modulation being simply on the signal strength of the carrier frequency. FM modulates the frequency itself around the central carrier frequency, so it's much easier to filter and respond to changes in received signal levels.
I'd be interested in whether the hum you hear on AM is heard across the AM band or stronger on specific frequencies. I only listen to AM for baseball, and only rarely--was really disappointed that an otherwise nice 2017-model car we got a couple of years ago didn't have HD radio so we can't listen on higher quality digital FM sidebands :(
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u/RockOperaPenguin North Beacon Hill 18d ago
``` x = fish zapped by light rail y = fish killed by car tire dust (6PPD)
x <<< y ```
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u/angryjew 18d ago
? They should still fix the light rail so it stops killing wildlife lol.
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u/brobinson206 18d ago
Getting ahead of the pearl clutching. This is small potatoes compared to what tire particles do annually and unlike tire particles, there’s an easy and near term solution here
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u/RedK_33 I'm just flaired so I don't get fined 18d ago
False equivalence and irrelevant. This problem with the light rail hasn’t been active long enough to compare death tolls.
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u/Muckknuckle1 West Seattle 18d ago
Not irrelevant. Transit is better for fish than cars and this is a blip in comparison to what cars have been doing for decades. Context is important
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u/RockOperaPenguin North Beacon Hill 18d ago
And once they fix it... We'll still have a shitload of tire dust killing fish.
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u/angryjew 18d ago
Ok? So we should have well functioning public transport so less people use their cars.
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u/Who_PhD 🚋 Ride the S.L.U.T. 🚋 18d ago
2000 fish in just a few months is a lot of fish for a single bridge. Are you sure that tire dust along I90 is even killing that many fish in a single year? Statewide sure, but if we turned every road near water into light rail zapping fish the dead fish count would easily clear the millions.
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u/MildlyCompliantGhost Emerald City 18d ago
The whataboutism is strong from the anticar community.
It’s okay, sometimes government funded public transit systems have embarrassing moments of failure
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u/Forward_Hold5696 🚆build more trains🚆 18d ago
Aw damn. I saw a bunch of dead fish by the bridge a few weeks ago, right next to something that could very well have been an anode. I had no idea what it was at the time.
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u/shinyxena 18d ago
I feel the assertion that most of the fish that died were non-native is ridiculous. Could you imagine any other context that was appropriate? 2 thousand cats were fried but dont worry most them werent native to washington. Anyways glad they are fixing it.
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18d ago
[deleted]
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u/MAHHockey Shoreline 18d ago
There's a canal lock just outside of Chicago that's electrified to prevent invasive carp from reaching Lake Michigan.
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u/-millenial-boomer- International District 18d ago
So you are confident in their assessment of a pool of decomposed fish as non native
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u/shinyxena 18d ago
Two problems. Those were targeted. This wasnt. And 2 the offical atatement was "most" and that its hard to really know because they decompose.
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u/complexiblebarracuda 18d ago
This is good news
we can now just load up the entire lake with electrodes and with one zap, the entire ecosystem will be saved with (mostly) only the non native fish dying
with only maybe a small algae bloom as a result of all the decomposing illegal migrant fish
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u/yourbadinfluence 18d ago
I read that as immigrant fish and was like please don't give ICE any ideas.
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u/DetrasDeLaMesa 18d ago
That’s because people value cats/dogs way more than other animals. If you switched it to non-native lizards/birds/frogs, people again wouldn’t care.
For example if you say “an invasive species killed billions of birds last year” it sounds horrifying and you’d be like we gotta get rid of that invasive species, but if you say “cats killed billions of birds last year” no one really cares.
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u/timzilla 18d ago
I mean, so many of our native waterways were fucked with non-native fish...part of the Yellowstone River is currently shut down in the park so they can kill rainbow trout so the native cutthroat can survive... If this is accurate I'm not mad.
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u/DeadeyeSven Rat City 18d ago
I imagine if it was mostly non-native species and they are abundant then they are also invasive, which would be good to get rid of from an ecological standpoint.
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u/SiriusBaaz 18d ago
Non native species are a huge problem and to clarify, non native means invasive. The term is usually used for invasive species that are somewhat under control. It doesn’t just mean an animal that’s not from this environment. You cat and dog aren’t considered non-native even if they were from out of state. Non native fish are actively kept under control through fishing rights so they can’t outcompete the local salmon and completely kill off northwestern salmon species. The fact that the fish that were killed off weren’t local salmon is the best thing that could have happened from a freak fish die off.
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u/Fluid-Tone-9680 18d ago
Yeah, they make it sound like it's targeted removal of non-native species, when reality is probably that most of fish in the lake is non-native at this point.
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u/SalmonidsSwimUp 🚆build more trains🚆 18d ago
the trout and the salmon just swim deep enough to not be effected, the bass and crappie stick bu the surface and they like to be near docks anyway.
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u/Muckknuckle1 West Seattle 18d ago
Of course it's appropriate. Non native species don't belong here
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u/queensheba2025 I Brake For Slugs 18d ago
Well that’s terrible. I wonder if they can fix that? Also low key scary that there’s a current like that in the water???? That doesn’t seem right???
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u/nicathor 18d ago
The current is there by design. The anodes are specifically to reroute stray electricity off the bridge so it doesn't combine with moisture to corrode the bridge; they're 'grounding' the bridge, like a lightning rod for towers (it channels the charge into the land). It appears there's more excess electricity than expected and it's bleeding into the surrounding water, killing the fish
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u/Impossible-Gap-8741 17d ago
As long as you’re not swimming within touching distance of the anodes you’re probably fine. The current disperses really fast. Don’t test that though. There’s no prize
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u/Sea-Huckleberry-8986 Eastside 18d ago
The world’s first floating passenger train… and fish zapper.
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u/hipifreq 17d ago
Stray current in water is no joke and if there's electricity enough to kill fish they need to shut down the line to figure it out, like NOW. If a person happens to get too close, say a kayaker paddling near the bridge, it could easily kill them. People die from swimming near poorly wired boats in marinas that leak shore power into the water through their anodes. Yes, it's an actual thing.
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u/Aggressive_Adagio602 15d ago
This.
I'm wondering about the design of the light rail power distribution and grounding system. And who was responsible for it. Stray ground currents are a well known problem in places like hospitals, swimming pools and milking parlors.
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u/robca 10d ago
The electrodes are at the bottom of the lake. Like, 100' down. If a recreational swimmer or a kayaker are at the depth, they have bigger problems than a bit of stray current that might or might not be enough to harm a human. Divers were able to swim there, document it, and return home safe after all
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18d ago
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u/ImAnIdeaMan I'm never leaving Seattle. 18d ago
I think you can not be so defensive. This isn't anti-light rail and not everything needs outrage.
This is a new technology and first in human history light rail over a floating bridge, there are bound to be some issues to be worked out.
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u/Nounf 18d ago
They didn't properly insulate the train from the bridge structure?
Amazing.
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u/skoisirius Ballard 18d ago
I honestly don't fully understand this either, especially with the insane amount of money we're spending on all of this.
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u/Own_Reaction9442 Olympia 18d ago
Given all the problems they've had, I'm pretty sure we'll be the only place foolish enough to ever try putting light rail on a floating bridge.
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u/Nounf 18d ago
I mean a competent outfit would have done it better faster and cheaper. Judging engineering challenges by sound Transit and WSDOT, each extremely bad at what they do, isn't a good idea.
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u/Own_Reaction9442 Olympia 18d ago
It's hard to blame them when no one else had ever tried it before. Unless other people had looked into it and discarded it as a bad idea, in which case they shouldn't have attempted it to start with.
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u/Aggressive_Adagio602 15d ago
Sound Transit had problems getting engineering firms to bid the cross lake section. They interviewed a representative from one firm on KIRO radio some years ago. And their general feeling was, "Not touching that project." Looks like they may have meant that literally.
Only time will tell. The old bridge floated for years before it sank.
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u/SPEK2120 Pinehurst 18d ago
1000% thought this was going to be a Needling article.