SPOKANE — I-90 over Snoqualmie Pass, closed for most of the week by heavy snowfall and avalanche danger, may reopen this morning, a state Transportation Department official said Friday night.
The pass could open between 3 and 5 a.m. today “if all goes well,” said Don Whitehouse, Transportation Department south-central regional administrator.
“I’m stressing the ‘if all goes well’ part,” he added, “because we expect more snow to fall up here overnight, and we still have a lot of work to do to remove the snow that fell onto the roadway from the avalanche control work.”
Still, Whitehouse termed Friday’s avalanche control efforts “tremendously successful.”
On Thursday, “our avalanche risk on the pass was extreme,” he said. “After today’s efforts, it has been reduced to a low-to-moderate risk at the roadway level.”
The state’s main east-west traffic route across the Cascade Range has been closed for all but six hours since Tuesday morning.
On Friday, crews cleared 30 avalanche paths by detonating 365 pounds of explosives, Whitehouse said.
Since the series of storms began last Sunday, avalanche control experts have used a total of 1,500 pounds of explosives to cause avalanches. Additional snow blowers from other areas of the state have been brought in to help remove the dislodged snow.
The pass closure is the longest since a storm shut down traffic over the pass for about 84 hours between Dec. 28, 1996, and Jan. 2, 1997, DOT spokeswoman Alice Fiman said.
More than 5 feet of snow has fallen on the pass during the storms. The Transportation Department said Friday morning that 19 inches had fallen at the pass in the previous 24 hours, and the National Weather Service forecast up to 20 inches more by early today.
Snow depth on 3,022-foot-high Snoqualmie Pass was 130 inches, or 165 percent of the average Feb. 1 seasonal amount, weather service meteorologist Dennis D’Amico in Seattle said earlier Friday.
The extreme weather closed a 70-mile stretch of I-90 from North Bend east across the mountains to Ellensburg. Windblown snow kept many roads and schools closed Friday in Eastern Washington, including Washington State University in Pullman and the University of Idaho in nearby Moscow.
The heavy snow delighted operators of ski resorts, even if customers couldn’t reach the slopes. At The Summit at Snoqualmie, normally the state’s busiest resort, the hills were quiet, but marketing director Guy Lawrence said the loss of business was “a hiccup so far” in an otherwise lucrative winter.
Other resorts still reachable in Washington’s mountains reported a surge in business, both because of Snoqualmie’s closure and the excellent conditions.
Still, the long shutdown of I-90 over Snoqualmie Pass has disrupted the state’s economy, Gregoire and other officials said. Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond said 7,000 trucks cross the pass each day, about one-quarter of total traffic on the pass.
“We know these truckers have been waiting,” Whitehouse said earlier. “We know what this is doing to the economy.”
State officials had no estimate on how much the closure might be costing the state each day.
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