A piece of Seattle maritime history gave the city a scare on Monday morning when the Skansonia, a former ferry now moored on Lake Union, began taking on water and raised fears that it could sink. The decommissioned vessel ultimately remained afloat, but for several hours emergency crews worked to keep it upright and reassure onlookers worried about its fate.
The Skansonia is no ordinary boat. It is a wooden built ferry constructed all the way back in 1929 and retired from service decades ago, around the 1960s or 1970s. In the years since, it has found a second life parked on Lake Union, where it has been used as a wedding venue rather than as a working vessel carrying passengers across the water.
According to the Seattle Fire Department, the alarm was raised at around 6:45 in the morning when 911 calls came in from a civilian maintenance crew working at the 200 block of Northeast Northlake Way. They reported that the private, decommissioned ferry, which measures 165 feet in length and occupies roughly 8,400 square feet of space, was taking on water and that the situation had gone beyond what their own equipment could handle.
Spokesman David Cuerpo explained that the civilian crew was only able to remove about 130 gallons of water per minute, which was not enough to keep up with the flooding. In response, the fire department brought in additional resources, deploying Marine One, Marine 80 and the fireboat Chief Seattle to add their far more powerful water removal equipment to the effort.
With the extra capability, crews were able to pump out water at a rate of around 1,500 gallons per minute, a dramatic increase over what the maintenance team could manage on its own. Firefighters continued removing water from the vessel for about two hours as they worked to bring the situation under control and correct the boat's dangerous lean.
The turning point came when the owner of the vessel arrived and informed responders of features they could not see from the outside. The ferry has a steel reinforced skid, an exterior hull designed to protect it from abrasions and damage, as well as additional flotation devices or buoys mounted underneath the vessel that were hidden from the naked eye and capable of helping to stabilize it.
Once the crews had corrected the list, they stopped removing water and monitored the vessel for a while, finding that it remained stable and upright. The fire department then removed all of its equipment and turned the scene back over to the owner so that maintenance work could continue, with any concerns that the historic ferry might sink alleviated for the time being.