Northwest Briefly: Navy working on new carrier pier at Bremerton
Published 11:23 pm Thursday, September 4, 2008
BREMERTON — Construction has started on a new pier at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard to better handle the Navy’s newer aircraft carriers.
Shipyard commander Capt. Mark Whitney says the $123 million project will replace a 60-year-old pier built to handle carriers from the post-World War II era. More than twice as wide and more than 1,300 feet long, the new pier will accommodate today’s Nimitz-class carriers and ships planned for the future.
The Navy wants much of the work completed by October 2010, when the USS Nimitz arrives for a yearlong overhaul. The entire project is to be completed by January 2012.
Olympia: Amtrak ridership up in region
The number of people riding Amtrak trains in Oregon and Washington has increased by 12 percent so far this year.
The state Department of Transportation says that the Amtrak Cascades service — which operates four daily roundtrips between Portland and Seattle and also provides links to Bellingham, Eugene and Vancouver, B.C. — served nearly 80,000 passengers in July alone. The Transportation Department says that’s up 12.4 percent over the previous July. Ridership between Seattle and Portland has increased by about 26 percent, compared with 2007.
Amtrak Cascades is operated by Amtrak under conÂtract to the transportation departÂments of Washington and Oregon.
From Herald news services
