Rockslide Shuts I-90 Through Snoqualmie Pass: Boulders Fall Onto Westbound Lanes, But No One Is Hurt
From the Seattle PI:
A rockslide early Sunday closed a section of Interstate 90 at Snoqualmie Pass, and state transportation workers expected the highway to be closed at least through today.
The slide occurred shortly after 3:15 a.m., sending large rocks into the westbound lanes six miles east of Snoqualmie Summit. No one was injured, and a large truck managed to get through the slide debris just before state snowplows arrived. Two of the rocks were described as being the size of midsize cars.
Traffic was diverted to Stevens Pass to the north and White Pass to the south. Vehicles were moving without major problems over White Pass, but it was slow going over Stevens Pass Highway, a two-lane road not designed to handle the large volumes of traffic that use I-90 over Snoqualmie Pass.
State Trooper Keith Leavry said it was taking westbound motorists 2 1/2 hours to drive from the Stevens Pass summit to Monroe. Drivers were advised to avoid cross-Cascades travel.
"We really need people not to travel (today) ... to keep from long delays and backups," said State Department of Transportation spokesman Mike Westbay.
Farther south, motorists were advised to cross the Columbia River at the Biggs Bridge on U.S. Route 97 and use Interstate 84 in Oregon.
An assessment of the hillside determined it remained unstable, with "two to three times more material ready to go down on the road," said Transportation spokeswoman Jamie Holter.
"The rockslide is more significant than we initially thought," she said. "Geologists say there's more rock than we thought up there that's hanging over and is turning this into a very dangerous situation."
Westbay said officials estimated that the amount of material that could come down was equal to a September rockslide that sent hundreds of tons of rock onto the westbound lanes two miles west of the summit.