I suspect that all of us have heard, or even said, that time and tide waits for nobody, or as the great Robert Burns phrased it “Nah man can tether time or tide.” Here in my fair city, this is certainly the case, though, as I have written before, we tend not to notice the twice daily tidal changes. Some of the impacts are obvious, such as ferry schedules, water currents, and beach erosion, but as I like to do in my newsletter, here are a few lesser known and unexpected and totally cool ways that tides have played out, and continue to play out, in the Seattle area.
I worked for Boeing for 34 years, and retired in 1993. A lot of the time I worked in what they call the “B52 building”. That is the large hanger-like building parallel to the runway. The construction of the building is cantilevered. The internal walls are hanging from the roof. It was a usual thing to see a variable gap at the bottom of the main north-south wall during the day as the tide changed. Some to the old timers told me that when the B52 was in there being setup for testing back in the early 40s, they had a curious problem. The day shift would setup and level the jigs and the transits etc. (this was before the days of lasers) ready for the second shift to start the testing, but when the second shift came in, things were all out of whack. So they had to start over. Someone noticed that the problem was periodic, and seemed to be related to the tides. That was proven to be correct.
I worked for Boeing for 34 years, and retired in 1993. A lot of the time I worked in what they call the “B52 building”. That is the large hanger-like building parallel to the runway. The construction of the building is cantilevered. The internal walls are hanging from the roof. It was a usual thing to see a variable gap at the bottom of the main north-south wall during the day as the tide changed. Some to the old timers told me that when the B52 was in there being setup for testing back in the early 40s, they had a curious problem. The day shift would setup and level the jigs and the transits etc. (this was before the days of lasers) ready for the second shift to start the testing, but when the second shift came in, things were all out of whack. So they had to start over. Someone noticed that the problem was periodic, and seemed to be related to the tides. That was proven to be correct.
Donald Haff