Spring cleaning heads up: Snohomish County transfer station closing for most of March

It’s that time of year. Time to clean out the house and make that run to the dump. But for people in Snohomish County, your spring cleaning might be interrupted by construction at the transfer station.

Snohomish County’s biggest transfer station will be closed for most of March.

The Airport Road Recycling & Transfer Station facility at the south end of Paine Field will close on March 9 and remain closed until March 29. The county is resurfacing the tipping floor, which is the entire concrete slab where you dump your garbage.

“You see the front loaders running by, where you dump all the garbage, and they push it into the chute,” project manager Michel Smith said. “That’s the tipping floor, and that’s what needs to get repaired.”

The surface was last repaired in 2017, and it’s time for more work. The facility handled more than 250,000 tons of garbage last year, plus the massive 25-ton front loaders rolling all over it. That’s a lot of wear and tear. The repair is quite similar to repaving or fixing a bridge deck.

“They will grind it down to the specified depth, then they will compact it, and then they will lay concrete down,” Smith said. “It’s kind of like a bridge deck, if you think of it that way. So it’s a nice concrete floor. It’ll be reinforced rebar.”

If you’re making a dump run during the closure, you are going to need to use the smaller facilities in Mountlake Terrace or Arlington, and you should expect delays.

“During the shutdown, you should expect longer wait times at our other two facilities, so prepare and plan ahead,” Smith said.

You can check the Snohomish County website for more information.

“We do have a check the line feature on there, which has cameras that face the line going into the facility,” Smith said. “Customers are always encouraged to visit this website. You just check the line and see what the wait times are there.”

More than 1,200 people a day use the Airport Road facility on peak days. You also have commercial garbage trucks and haulers. And it’s not just the tipping floor area that will be closed. The entire facility, including recycling, will be closed.

Not that I’m giving you the okay to blow off your spring cleaning, but you might want to make that dump run the next two weeks or wait until April.

And if you’re curious, this is why it’s called a tipping floor.

“The word tip comes from England,” Smith said. “When they refer to the dump, they refer to it as the tip. And so that has just made its way to America.”

The floor doesn’t actually move, if you are curious.

The project costs more than $2 million. The Airport Road facility is 23 years old.

Chris Sullivan is a traffic reporter for KIRO Newsradio. Read more of his stories here. Follow KIRO Newsradio traffic on X.

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