This has come up in comments on other items (like this thread), and in the WSB Forums – what’s up with all the work on Barton, which is a busy thoroughfare for folks traveling to Fauntleroy Church and Fauntleroy YMCA (WSB sponsors) and the businesses in the Fauntleroy Schoolhouse, as well as heading east from the ferry dock and Endolyne businesses? One neighbor pointed out it was gas-line work. We called the Puget Sound Energy media department. Two business days, no callback. So next we tried SDOT, knowing they would at least have had to have issued a permit, and they responded within a few hours. Here’s the information we got back from SDOT communications boss Rick Sheridan:
This work is a major replacement by PSE of part of their infrastructure and is a permitted right-of-way activity. The work will replace more than 8000 feet of pipe and will run through a number of streets in West Seattle. PSE has an approved traffic control plan and we expect them to
be finished by December 6, 2008, though this work can sometime run long.Our permit requires them to notify everyone who may be affected at least 72 hours before the work in the right-of-way begins. This is a standard period of time required for this type of effort.
We will contact PSE to remind them of this obligation and will also send a Street Use inspector to examine the site.
Given how well-used that stretch of road is, you’d expect notifying “everyone who may be affected” would have involved notices to local media, but it didn’t, so far as we can tell. SDOT itself is good about advance notice of road work in the case of most projects of this scale.
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