Sullivan: What lurks beneath I-90 fish passage project?
Jan 28, 2025, 6:11 AM | Updated: 10:37 am
It’s been a year and a half since the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT) started tearing up Interstate 90 (I-90) in Factoria for a massive fish passage project. How’s the work going?
I figured it was time to get an update on the work, considering that several listeners have asked me recently when the lanes on I-90 are going to open up. To make room for construction, the contractor, Atkinson Construction, had to take the inside lane of I-90 in both directions near the Eastgate Park and Ride, and it shut down on the on-ramp at 142nd Place East.
While eastbound traffic has handled the closure OK, the westbound closure is causing huge backups in the morning and afternoon. I’ll get back to that in a moment because what’s happening under the freeway is impressive.
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Walking down between eastbound and westbound I-90, you get a sense of just how much is going on just out of view from above. Mounds of dirt. New girders and a flurry of activity.
“We’ve essentially gone through here and built a series of bridges over eastbound and westbound I-90, as well as 36th, on shallow foundations, essentially building from the top down,” Atkinson Construction Senior Project Manager Larry Smith told KIRO Newsradio. “We’ve set the bridges in and excavated enough to get the girders in so we could start working our way from the top down.”
Workers have removed about 30 feet of dirt and other material from under the freeway. They have to go down another 30-40 feet to get to the natural stream bed.
“To get down to the stream below, it’ll allow us to reconstruct and restore the old stream bed and take out the pipes along the way,” Smith said. “We’ve got some utilities to relocate a sewer, then the storm (system) will come out. We have a series of new storm lines to tie back into the stream at a different point from where they are now. So we’ll realign that.”
It really is a massive undertaking, and that’s why it’s going to take another year to wrap up. But so far, Smith said he’s happy with the progress.
“I can tell you is, as a bidder, when I first looked at this, I thought, ‘Why are we doing this huge hole? There’s no way this is going to work. How are we going to do this?'” Smith said. “Now, we’re on the verge of having it done, and it’s gone as well as we could have hoped.”
Back to the congestion and the returning of those lanes on I-90.
Seth Belknap is WSDOT’s project manager for this job. He outlined the current schedule.
“To return to its original configuration, we’re looking, at the latest, February of 2026,” he said. “Now we are continually working through ways to where we can expedite that.”
The current plan is to open the westbound I-90 lane sometime this year, maybe as early as May. The eastbound lane would open later, but considering how the traffic patterns and congestion have evolved during this closure, WSDOT’s Belknap said the final decision on which side to open first is up in the air.
“We have to weigh the impacts to the traveling public and the safety of our workers,” he said. “Those are the top two items.”
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Atkinson is on board with the potential schedule change.
“We keep eastbound closed longer, it generally treats traffic better,” Smith said. “We can open up westbound in lieu of that and make that trade,” Atkinson said. “Really, what we’re going through now is, what’s that mean for other projects? What’s that mean for the public? And what’s that mean for the project? What’s the right answer for everybody?”
As for the next item on the construction to-do list, Smith said it’s about getting down the stream bed and moving the work zones on the north and south of I-90.
“Right now, we’re working on restoring the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trail across the bridge and get that last piece done,” he said. “That’ll set us up for starting our soil nail walls mid-March and then, around April 1, we’ll close Eastgate Way once after we get 36th open.”
When the project is done, Sunset Creek will run smoothly under I-90. The channel will be about 70 feet wide. The creek is expected to run in the middle 50 feet, opening up a large area of habitat that’s been closed since the freeway was built.
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