Not-so-quick-fix becomes I-405 traffic headache during commute
Mar 5, 2015, 8:02 AM | Updated: 10:59 am
Emergency repairs to an exposed expansion joint during Wednesday morning’s commute led to an eight-mile backup on southbound Interstate 405 between Bellevue and Renton. The timing has many asking: Could those repairs have been pushed back until after the morning commute?
Workers found the joint sticking up from the concrete shortly after midnight, early Wednesday morning. It posed an immediate danger to cars, so the Washington State Department of Transportation decided to shut down that lane.
Bookmark it: Check your current traffic conditions
“We never like to do that, we never like to see people wait in traffic,” said WSDOT’s Mike Allende. “But it was a situation where, at that point, we’d rather do that then put drivers in an unsafe situation.”
Allende said they decided to take a little bit of a gamble and squeeze in the repair immediately, instead of waiting.
“Because they had temporarily repaired this joint in the past, they saw an opportunity where they had dry weather and low traffic volumes. They thought they would be able to make a permanent fix to this before the morning commute started up,” explained Allende.
But the damage was worse than they expected. Crews factored-in the cold overnight temperatures, but it was just too cold for the mixture used to cover the exposed joint to set.
“That’s (why) we ended up having to go into the morning commute before we were able to open (the lanes) to drivers,” said Allende.
Workers did everything they could to speed the repairs, Allende said. “They used torches, they did things to try and heat it up to move it along, but that wasn’t working so they just had to wait it out until it got firm enough that drivers could move over it.”
But why did the state close multiple lanes in order to make a repair on an expansion joint only affecting one lane?
According to WSDOT, because the exposed joint was in the center lane, in order to give workers a safe work zone, they had to block off an additional lane.
Had it been one of the outside lanes, crews could have just used the shoulder.
