Dump Truck Calamity In Seattle

Seattle has some crazy steep roads near downtown.... this isn't OKC. I can see it happening. Plowing into Devner, CO. nope.

 

I would hate to have been in hat subway. I knew there was a good reason to not go in them. I have a feeling that his mechanical rouble will be poor brakes, and somebody is going o be in hot water.

 

Wondering if they had an automatic and their foot was on the brake and accelerator.

 

I lived in Seattle more than 25 years ago. I had a girlfriend who worked at a florist shop about a block from where this happened. I worked on the other end of downtown in a big highrise on 5th and Pike. We used to do stuff downtown all the time, so I'm pretty familiar with the area, although it has changed a lot since the early 90s. The streets from Capital Hill to downtown are all pretty steep as they head down to the water.

This is basically the original downtown of Seattle. James Street sort of Ts into Yesler Way. Because different people platted the original area, the roads are not square. The Subway the dump truck ran into is on Yesler Way, named after Henry Yesler who owned a mill that the greased logs were skidded down to from the hills above way back in the 1850s.

Yesler Way is the proper name of the original Skid Road or Skid Row.

 

I've not yet been in the city itself; only the outskirts--however, I imagine it and Portland have some similarities re: the streets. I just Google mapped the area of the incident and followed James Street back up...that is one step incline alright, for a good half a mile through city blocks back up to about 9th Avenue. (And of course I see many dump trucks on Street View.) Yeah that'd be a hurtpiece for sure to lose some brakes on.