Closures for Mukilteo ferry
Published 6:46 pm Thursday, January 27, 2011
MUKILTEO — The Mukilteo ferry terminal will be closed for three weekends — from Friday morning through Sunday night — in March and April for extensive repairs.
Thousands of riders will have to find another way to go to or from Whidbey Island on the weekends of March 18-20, March 25-27 and April 1-3.
To help compensate, the ferry system will run boats between Edmonds and Clinton on Whidbey Island on those dates. Seventeen sailings are scheduled for that temporary route for each of the three Fridays and 16 each for Saturday and Sunday, compared to 37 and 35 on the usual Mukilteo-Clinton schedule, officials said.
There is expected to be heavier traffic at the Edmonds terminal, which runs its regular route between Edmonds and Kingston. The schedule for Edmonds-Kingston sailings will not change, but the extra traffic could cause delays, said Joy Goldenberg, a spokeswoman for the ferry system.
“We’re doing the best we can given the situation,” she said. “We were very aware that this needed to happen before Memorial Day weekend.”
The work in Mukilteo involves replacing the mechanical and electrical systems that operate the transfer span and its apron — the platform that bridges the dock and the boats.
These parts typically last about 30 years, said Nicole McIntosh, terminal engineering manager for the system.
Mukilteo-Clinton is the third-most heavily traveled route in the system, after Seattle-Bainbridge and Edmonds-Kingston. Ferries carried nearly 3.9 million passengers between Mukilteo and Clinton in 2010.
In the first three months of last year, an average of more than 70,000 riders used the route per week.
The transfer span mechanism has been repaired 115 times in the past five years, resulting in 57 lost trips, said Marta Coursey, another spokeswoman for the system.
“It’s one of our oldest transfer spans,” she said. “It has to be preserved, and it has to be repaired now. If it went much longer we would have safety concerns.”
The work is estimated to cost $905,000, McIntosh said.
The cost will include other, unrelated repairs to the head frame, the tower above the dock, that will be done concurrently, she said.
The terminal is targeted to be replaced eventually, possibly including a move to the former tank farm east of the current terminal. Because of funding shortages, that is not scheduled to happen before 2017.
Bill Sheets: 425-339-3439; sheets@heraldnet.com.
