Get ready for The Crawl, Part 2.
Highway 9 in Snohomish will not open in time for this evening’s commute. That means commuters in north and east Snohomish County who slogged through hours of delay this morning to get to work should anticipate a replay on the way home.
The morning commute “was awful beyond belief,” said Trooper Kirk Rudeen, a spokesman for the Washington State Patrol. “Anybody who left for work this morning knows it’s going to be a long trip home.”
Highway 9 was closed Tuesday evening and it won’t reopen until the Snohomish River drops. The river is continuing spill floodwater over several levees in city of Snohomish area.
Rudeen said the closure forced the 20,000 people who normally use Highway 9 each weekday morning to reroute to I-5, Highway 529 through Marysville, or Highway 522 from Monroe to Woodinville.
“It took me an hour to go six miles” on U.S. 2, Rudeen said.
U.S. 2 was slammed, but so were all the feeder roads, said Rudeen, who said that people’s secret short cuts weren’t so secret this morning.
“Those were jammed up (too),” he said.
Rudeen said to expect similar congestion, but in the opposite direction this afternoon, with northbound traffic backing up on I-5 even worse than it does already. Northbound Highway 522 and Highway 529 likely will be parking lots as well, he said.
The state Department of Transportation plans to rush to inspect and clean Highway 9 as soon as the river drops below the levees again and water drains off the highway’s surface.
“Once the water recedes, it’s only a matter of hours to clean up the road,” said Dave McCormick, the department’s assistant regional administrator for maintenance and traffic operations.
If there’s no damage, reopening the highway should just be a matter of scraping off any mud and silt from the road, he said.
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