Rain scrubs away stripes along state Highway 503

Highway workers laid down seven miles’ worth of paint on state Highway 503 near Amboy on Wednesday, only to have it wash away in the rain. (Washington Department of Transportation)

Rain washed away seven miles' worth of fresh highway paint in north Clark County last week.

The incident occurred Wednesday, after a crew of six state transportation workers had spent much of the day carefully restriping the center line and fog lines on seven miles of Highway 503 between Lewisville Park and Amboy. They paused as a soft rain began falling in the afternoon.

"At the first sign of rain, we stop," said Dan Gruenberg, a maintenance supervisor for the Department of Transportation in Vancouver.

Gruenberg said the water-based paint is a new type designed to work in cold weather, but the roadways need to be bare when it's applied. It normally takes a minute or so for the paint to dry.

On Wednesday, the rain revealed that workers had a bad batch of paint.

As rain continued to fall, the white fog lines and yellow center line closest to the workers began to smear. Worse, motorists began calling the DOT office in Vancouver to report that all of the freshly painted highway was swiftly going the way of a first-grader's watercolor — including areas painted hours before.

"Have you ever tried painting your gutters, and then it starts raining?" said Abbi Russell, a WashDOT spokeswoman.

That's pretty much what happened to Highway 503 as precise lines of yellow and white morphed into hazy smears across the asphalt. "Bizarre," Russell said.

Workers had to repaint the highway in the first place because much of the previous striping had been scraped away by snowplows during an especially hard winter. The striping crew had worked its way through much of a 245-gallon tote of paint when the rain intervened.

Gruenberg said the manufacturer, whom he would not identify, agreed to swap out an entire truckload — 2,940 gallons — included in the batch.

"This crew has been here seven to 10 years," he said. "We've never seen this kind of thing happen before."