State Halts Car Ferry Service on Keystone, Port Townsend, and San Juan Routes
Just in time for the holidays, Washington State transportation officials have decided that four ferries that provide car ferry service on Keystone, Port Townsend and San Juan Island routes are unsafe.
From the Seattle Times:
The Steel Electric boats — the Klickitat, the Illahee, the Nisqually and the Quinault — were built in 1927 and serve the Port Townsend-Keystone and the San Juan Islands interisland routes. They are the only car ferries that can operate in Keystone’s narrow, shallow harbor.
The affected ferries were pulled from service after their last sailing Tuesday night. By early Wednesday evening, drivers at the Edmonds dock were facing a 90-minute wait, although that had fallen to 60 minutes by midevening.
For now, the state’s oldest ferries will be tied up at least until the end of January while they are inspected for cracks and leaks in their hulls.
“It’s terrible. It’s like a bridge going down,” said State Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island, chairwoman of the Senate Transportation Committee. “The fact they’re facing a two-month outage is terrible.”
This is one of the costs of having only one organization control ferry service. When it goes down, there are no alternatives. In addition, the ferries have been maintained based on the same policies which obviously were not effective in preventing this from happening.
Just wait until they control health care.
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