Direct route between Mukilteo and Everett to be cut for a year

Here is a Halloween trick: Turning 500 feet into 10 miles. How do you do that? You close a vital bridge between Everett and Mukilteo.

It took me 136 steps to walk across the Edgewater Bridge on West Mukilteo Boulevard. It’s under 500 feet from end to end over a deep ravine holding Edgewater Creek. But starting next week, those 136 steps will turn into a 10-mile trek.

The 78-year-old functionally obsolete bridge will be closed on Oct. 30. It’s expected to remain closed for a year, cutting off direct access between Mukilteo and Everett.

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Everett City Engineer Tom Hood expects delays could reach about 20 minutes, but the routes are designed to minimize that.

“The good news is that those roadways have plenty of capacity, and so when the detour is in place, you actually shouldn’t notice much of a difference,” Hood said. “The 6,000 vehicles per day that use Mukilteo Boulevard here will be nicely distributed and dispersed through that detour route.”

Highways 525 and 526 will be the primary detour routes.

I spoke with a few residents who have been waiting for this project for years, and they weren’t quite sure it is really going to close next week. Hood said he understands this hesitancy, as work on this project started in 2017, and the pandemic didn’t help matters.

“It is an environmentally sensitive area, a lot of permitting involved with that,” he said. “We’ve had some snafus with our bidding process in the past, getting concurrence from WSDOT to award the contract, but we finally worked through all those. Now we’re ready to push ahead.”

Those same neighbors asked me why it is going to take a year to replace such a small bridge. I ran that question by project manager Dan Enrico. He said it’s not an easy place to work.

“It’s deep,” Enrico said. “60 feet down to the bottom of the ravine, and then we’re going to go another 30 feet or so into the soils down there for our foundations.”

The contractor is actually building three bridges in this project. The first two will be platforms necessary to build the bridge deck, and bringing heavy equipment into small residential streets isn’t easy either.

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“Some of the deliveries will need to have the tractor trailers be detached and have the crane turn them around so they can leave the site,” Enrico said. There is just no place to turn around on either side of the bridge.

And while the primary purpose of this project is to make the bridge more seismically robust, Hood said it will also be much more functional.

“We’ll have wider lanes across the bridge,” he said. “We also have sidewalks that are too narrow for modern standards, so we’ll be widening with new sidewalks. We’ll also be adding bicycle lanes to cross the bridge. So overall, the new bridge will be quite a bit wider than the existing one.”

The project is budgeted at $34 million. $28 million of that is coming from federal grants.

Editors’ note: This piece originally was published on Tuesday, Oct. 22. It has been updated and republished since then.

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