Chimney service in Seaview, Seattle

Seaview's waterline has been rebuilt more than once. Seattle Parks writes that the 1920s seawall at the Emma Schmitz overlook, 500 feet long, had suffered significant erosion and storm damage before the Army Corps of Engineers put in its replacement in 2020-2021. At Lowman Beach, the city went the other way in 2022: it pulled out the last section of seawall and a tennis court, restored the beach, and daylighted a remnant of Pelly Creek.

Above the road the problem is the slope, not the waves. The Seattle Landslide Study names Beach Drive SW first among the city's chronic slide areas, logs 25 slides since 1927 in the Beach Drive and Atlas Place area, including six deep-seated ones, and tallies another 18, dating from 1933, where SW Jacobsen Road crosses ground that falls away to the west. It also explains why the bluff toe holds: Beach Drive itself runs along the water and keeps waves off the foot of the slope, so the movement comes from water inside the hill.

For a chimney on this hillside, those records translate into habits rather than alarms. We treat the faces turned toward the water and the southerly winter wind as the worn ones until we have looked. We check whether a stack stands plumb and whether it has pulled away from the roof or wall. And we plan ladders, anchors and material handling before we quote, because on a downhill lot the work is often a story higher than the street suggests.

Seattle's unreinforced brick chimneys took damage three times in just over half a century, in 1949, 1965 and 2001, all deep quakes. The USGS team that mapped the last of them describes tight clusters of broken chimneys on the peninsula each of those three times. For 1965 there is a count, via HistoryLink: of 5,005 chimneys on 188 surveyed West Seattle blocks, 1,712 needed attention afterward.

The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program has modeled one explanation, a fold in the bedrock several hundred meters down that focuses waves arriving from the south. Its map is a model, not a list of addresses, and we make no claim about where Seaview falls on it. The practical point is the same anywhere on the peninsula: after a quake you can feel, an older masonry chimney deserves a camera before its next fire.

Seaview's wood smoke answers to a four-county regulator, the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, which both calls the bans and polices them. They are a cold-weather tool, called when still air in fall and winter holds wood smoke near the ground. Summer fire-safety bans are separate and come from the fire marshal.

Under Stage 1, wood fireplaces stay cold, and so does every uncertified stove or insert. Once a ban reaches Stage 2 the certified wood appliances go dark as well, pellet stoves included. The only households that may burn are those holding a prior exemption from the agency because nothing else in the home can keep it warm, and even they must keep smoke invisible for as long as the ban lasts.

Two standing rules apply outside ban days as well. State emission caps from Ecology apply to prefab fireplaces and to wood and pellet stoves, but a masonry fireplace built on site carries no cap at all, and selling an uncertified stove is illegal in the state. And the Clean Air Agency allows only seasoned, dry wood or manufactured logs as fuel. A clean flue and dry wood are what keep a Seaview fireplace on the right side of both.