All apologies to Secretary Wayne Clough— “a geotechnical engineer who reads and writes poetry,” a quote Michelle Obama gets laughs with in a pretty good speech— but I’m pretty sure this public exchange at the end of his introduction was the part more of the United States public was interested in:

In other design news, the Stranger put up (giant file size) versions of the draft environmental impact statements for the Deep Bore Tunnel. Crowdsourcing in the hope of somebody finding a chink in the armor, I think. Nothing I’ve seen so far strikes me as nearly so meaty a target as the fact that the WSDOT geotechnical report totally bungles our tectonic setting— no megathrust mention, attributing Nisqually to a shallow thrust “associated” fault, slickensides in boreholes downtown…