Friday night, I'm in bed at 11:30pm. My phone rings and a friend says "Turn on the TV."
My TV was on The History Channel, which was showing something like "Hitler's Kitchen Appliances," and TNT was re-running "The Beastmaster," for the millionth time, but all the local channels had this:
"Wow, another fire on Lake Union," I think. There had been two others in recent
memory. As I flip through the channels, every local station is covering it. To
my horror, the views start looking very familiar. Then it dawns on me -
this is the marina where my sailboat, Victoria, is moored!
I debated about heading down, but my wife urged me to go, knowing neither of us would get any sleep if I didn't. I hopped on my motorcycle to go check on things.
Fortunately, my boat appeared OK and not in imminent danger. The fires were still burning, but not at the intensity of the pictures above. About 1/3 or more of the other boats at Seattle Marina are gone.
Here's the layout of the marina, adapted from a 1990 aerial photograph. "A" dock had been extended since this photograph was taken:
'A' dock, the one just east of the Sunnyside boat ramp, and the largest, is total carnage - maybe 60-70% of the boats there are gone. I >think< some of the big ones at the end got away or were towed away, because I didn't see any wreckage where I know there were some very large boats, but the boats were not there at all.
'B' dock, the short one, appeared to be unscathed. Victoria is against the bulkhead at the base of B dock.
'C' dock lost maybe 10% of its boats. The layout of the docks is such that C
dock wraps around the end of B dock and gets close to A. I later found out that
the fire started in a boat on C dock, burnt through its moorings, drifted into A
dock, and lit the others up.
On Thursday, May 23, I got a chance to go down and take some pictures of the aftermath and cleanup effort.
Click
on this picture to see a ground-level overview of the marina. "C" dock is to the
left; it is burnt where the dock bends to the right. Victoria is the
sailboat against the bulkhead. The boats behind her are on "B" dock. Crews have
moved some of the burnt boats to "B" dock, but the were elsewhere during the
fire. To the far right is "A" dock, which suffered the most damage. Before the
fire, all the slips in "A" dock were occupied, including the uncovered ones far
into the lake.
Click
this picture to enlarge. This boat has been moved to "B" dock, but was elsewhere
during the actual fire. Many boats were still underwater.
Crews
are busy cleaning up the environmental mess of fuel, oil, and debris from the
fire.
Victoria
is a little greasy on her topsides, dirty from soot on her cabintop and in her
cockpit, and smells like burnt wood. But otherwise, she seems to be ok.