With the snow and ice storms behind them and days of rainfall ahead, Washington State Department of Transportation maintenance crews have shifted their focus to new priorities: flood control and cleanup.
“This is kind of unusual for us,” said Bob Kofstad, WSDOT’s regional operations and maintenance supervisor, as he toured local problem spots Wednesday.
“It happens every five or 10 years — but it’s not that we’re not used to it.”
WSDOT’s primary focus Wednesday and for the next few days is ensuring state highways don’t flood. Warmer temperatures and heavy rains are accelerating the melting process of snow and ice that built up along the roads.
To stave off any standing water on state highways, crews were out early Wednesday, clearing remaining snow from road shoulders and clearing blocked storm drains. By afternoon, the majority of the local highways were wet but in good condition.
An exception was one portion of state Highway 503 near Northeast 87th Street in Vancouver, which remained inundated with water. Kofstad said crews planned to use a vacuum truck to suck debris out of the drainage system in hopes that would get the water off the road.
After the threat of flooding diminishes, WSDOT’s maintenance crews will turn to repairing potholes.
The freeze/thaw effect of recent weather patterns has created a big crop of new potholes in Clark County. In the worst spots, crews will use a cold application patch material to temporarily fill the holes. But doing so is expensive, so many pothole repairs will await better weather.
As to the bent guardrails and downed trees and branches? That work will get done, too.
“We have lots of brush and broken branches to clean up — all the work most people won’t notice,” Kofstad said.
Regionally, WSDOT shifted resources to maintain the roads. A crew from Chehalis came down to pick up some of the Clark County work. Some workers and heavy equipment tackled the Columbia River Gorge, where a slide near Dog Mountain closed Highway 14 for most of the day.
“Crews worked the area overnight to ensure at least one lane of the highway stayed open, but as quickly as they cleared the snow, more came down. Shortly after 2:30 a.m. crews closed that section of the highway,” WSDOT spokeswoman Tamara Greenwell said in an email. The highway reopened Wednesday evening.
