Anderson Island’s roughly 1,500 residents depend on a county ferry for routine trips to the mainland. On Monday, the route had been without county service for a third day: the Steilacoom II was out of operation, and Pierce County had not provided an estimated time for service to resume.
No county vessel available on the route
The Steilacoom II developed a propulsion-system problem Saturday. The county’s other vessel, the Christine Anderson, was undergoing Coast Guard-required inspections and dry-dock maintenance, leaving neither boat available for the Steilacoom–Anderson Island–Ketron Island route, KOMO News reported.
County crews obtained replacement parts from a supplier in Vancouver, British Columbia, but the parts had to clear U.S. customs before installation and testing. A contractor was scheduled to start work Monday; the county’s Monday morning update gave no restoration estimate, The News Tribune reported. Residents made some trips by private boat while service was suspended. The breakdown also left some riders in Steilacoom and others on the islands without a clear return timeline, KIRO 7 reported.
Aging vessels, separate service pressures
The outage has left the route dependent on repairs to a fleet Pierce County itself describes as aging and in need of more maintenance. The vessels have different histories: The News Tribune reported that the Christine Anderson was built in 1994 and the Steilacoom II in 2006. That background does not establish the cause of the current propulsion failure.
There has been a previous, distinct mechanical interruption. During a separate late-February outage, a low-compression generator failure on the Steilacoom II led to cancellations over much of a weekend; service resumed two days later after Coast Guard approval for a temporary generator, The News Tribune reported. That incident involved a generator, not the propulsion-system problem reported in the current outage.
The county’s proposed 2027 schedule would delay two-boat service until July 1 because the Steilacoom II is scheduled for dry docking, and would limit two-boat sailings to the most-used times, according to Pierce County. Those are proposed future schedule changes, not an explanation for the present breakdown.
Communication remains part of the disruption
The outage also drew criticism over how residents were informed. State Rep. Mari Leavitt criticized the county’s communication, while county officials said updates improved by Sunday afternoon and acknowledged they could have sent more information earlier. The county said it had issued six communications through its alert system, website and app, The News Tribune reported. The repair timeline remained unresolved in the county’s Monday morning update.
