From CrossCut
I have tried to remind people over the years that far from being “Metronatural,” Seattle’s landscape has been massively terra-formed what with logging old growth, rerouting rivers, building canals, and washing away hillsides.
A much-quoted figure is that the “re-grading” of our original hillsides and dumping the fill into Elliott Bay (which created a lot of new developable land in Belltown, the Waterfront, Pioneer Square, SoDo, the industrial area, and elsewhere) moved an amount of earth equal to the diggings of the Panama Canal.