Commuters urged to leave early, avoid damaged roads

Drivers heading east toward Monroe on Highway 522 are being encouraged to find different ways home this evening.

One lane of Highway 522 is closed between Highway 202 and 195th Street NE.

“If they can leave earlier or later, that would be great – it would probably benefit them,” said Erin Bogenschutz, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation.

Flooding on Monday carved away a large section of the highway’s shoulder.

The state doesn’t have an official detour, but there are options to get around the anticipated bottleneck where the highway is reduced to a single lane for three miles.

Drivers can exit off Highway 522 in Woodinville at Highway 202, skirt around the closure on the Woodinville-Snohomish Road, and get back on at Highway 9.

They also can use the 128th Street-Cathcart Way route, although there could be backups there, too, because Seattle Hill Road is closed because of damage.

A third option -- not a good one -- is heading north on I-5 to Everett and joining traffic east across the U.S. 2 trestle.

Backups hadn’t started forming at 3 p.m., but “it’s early in the commute,” Bogenschutz said.

Urban flooding left a 60-foot long gash on the shoulder of the highway. In places, high water ate away parts of the shoulder 8 feet wide and 5 feet deep.

To the north, Seattle Hill Road is closed as traffic engineers scramble to figure out how to fix a blown out culvert. Repairs are expected to take at least four weeks. It is the biggest long-term transportation problem created by flooding in Snohomish and King counties, said Janice Fahning, a transportation department engineer.

Fahning said the Seattle Hill Road damage is especially troublesome because it could take weeks to fix. An estimated 9,000 drivers use the roadway each day.

Maple Road at Ash Way was the only remaining flood-closure in Lynnwood on Tuesday, Lynnwood Fire spokeswoman Marybeth O’Leary said. More than a dozen roads were closed Monday.

Sounder commuter rail service won’t resume between Everett and Seattle until Thursday at the earliest, said Linda Robson, a spokeswoman for Sound Transit.

“There was a new mudslide (Monday), which started that 48-hour clock over again,” Robson said.

Railroad rules require that all passenger rail service be halted until two days after a mudslide, she said. The hope was to resume service Wednesday morning, two days after a mudslide washed over the tracks on Sunday.

North of Index, county road crews were working Tuesday to clear a clogged drainage pipe on the Index-Galena Road.

Water backed up and was rushing across the rural road, which was badly damaged during last year’s floods.

The county still hadn’t fixed all the damage caused by last year's storms when Monday’s rain and weekend snow swept through the region.

“It gave us more work to do,” said Jack Lemke, a lead worker for Snohomish County Public Works.