SEATTLE — A total of 1.3 million people visit the Ballard Locks each year.
Few see the pumping plant, which looks like a museum.
"These are actually 1909 motors," said Nate McGowan, operations project manager at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, as he gave a tour of the control facility.
The motors still run. But the pipes that connect to them are crumbling.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened the locks in 1917.
The two locks connect Puget Sound with the higher water levels in Lake Union and Lake Washington, moving 49,000 vessels through the ship canal each year.
Until a pipe burst, the pumping plant emptied the large lock for annual maintenance.
For the last three years, the Corps of Engineers has been improvising with much smaller portable pumps.
The pump-out process is so slow that the closure to marine traffic every November that once lasted 14 days now takes 21.
Shipbuilders, machinery makers and construction companies are all affected.
"Lots of money, lots of jobs, lots of commerce relies on this place," McGowan said.
The locks are not just a connection, but a dam for regulating the lake levels.
The levels of the Interstate 90 and State Route 520 floating bridges on Lake Washington are regulated by the locks.
Together, the bridges carry more than 200,000 drivers each day.
Rick Rodda, assistant superintendent of bridge maintenance for the Washington State Department of Transportation, described the worst-case scenario: a failure at the locks that could trigger a rush of water toward Puget Sound.
"Lake Union's going to be a mess -- the houseboats, the fishing boats, everything that's tied on the shoreline," Rodda said.
Workers inside pontoons on the bridges would adjust anchor cables if Lake Washington water levels began dropping.
"If we have a large loss of pool, we're going to be taking this cable up a long ways," Rodda said during a tour of the pontoon.
Rodda says the bridges would survive, but traffic might be slowed to as little as 25 mph because a bump would form between the fixed and floating portions of the bridge.
While it's never happened in 98 years, a breach of the Ballard Locks could potentially come from a major earthquake or a big hit from a barge.
The Corps of Engineers would stop the lake from draining by stacking bulkheads in the water just above the locks.
But that emergency plan depends on a crane that dates back to 1922.
"Any crane operator off the street would be surprised to see this in operation," McGowan said in the crane house.
The levers and dials are antiquated.
After a cable problem was discovered and fixed in 2013, the Corps decided to no longer test the crane each year.
Still, McGowan says it will work in an emergency.
"It will be there when we need it, but it's time to reinvest and make it reliable," he said.
McGowan estimates a new crane would cost between $7 million and $9 million. In all, he says the locks could use $40 million in upgrades.
So far, the federal government has allocated $3.5 million to remove the old pipes in the pumping plant, but no money to replace them.
"It's very challenging keeping this aging infrastructure going," McGowan said.
McGowan said the saving grace for the Ballard Locks is that a century ago, the workers who built it overbuilt it.
That solid construction is now buying time for an old Seattle landmark that still plays a critical role.
KIRO