Closure of I-5 costing millions a day

The floodwaters blocking Interstate 5 likely will cost Washington's economy millions of dollars a day, with trucking firms bearing much of the immediate impact.

On a typical day, the state Department of Transportation estimates, about 11,000 trucks use the portion of I-5 in Lewis County that is under several feet of water. Hundreds of trucks are parked at rest areas, weigh stations and along roadsides waiting for the highway to reopen; hundreds more are detouring through Yakima.

Mike Brooks, manager of line haul services for Oak Harbor Freight Lines, said the company normally runs 25 to 30 trucks a day between Auburn and Portland.

Now, he said, a driver with a southbound load will head over Snoqualmie Pass on I-90 to Yakima, where the driver will meet another from Portland who came through the Columbia River Gorge. The two drivers will swap loads and head back the way they came.

The detour adds more than 180 miles to the normal 151-mile trip, he said.

"It's been crazy, I'll tell you that," Brooks said. "We have two choices: Leave the freight on the ground or go through Yakima, and no one can afford to leave freight on the ground. It'll get interesting if this goes on two, three more days."

The state was hoping to reopen I-5 Thursday, but that depends on whether extensive damage is found when the waters recede.

State Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond on Tuesday estimated the closure's economic impact at $4 million a day. But it could be much higher, depending on how many trucks remain stuck or diverted by floods.

A long-haul truck costs $90 to $100 an hour to operate, said Bruce Agnew, director of the Discovery Institute's Cascadia Center, a think tank. Multiply that by the 11 hours a driver is allowed behind the wheel each day, and you get an estimated daily cost of $1,050 per truck.

Assuming only half the 11,000 trucks that use the affected stretch of highway get around the flooding, the cost of those that don't is $5.8 million a day. And that doesn't include the cost of extra fuel for the detouring trucks, lost sales at retailers who can't get inventory, or other less-obvious costs.

Dan Gatchet, president of Seattle-based West Coast Trucking, said his firm typically makes about five runs a day between Seattle and Portland — largely produce headed for groceries.

With those trucks now going through Yakima, Gatchet said, each daily run costs the company an extra $700 to $800. For now, he said, West Coast is absorbing that.

"But if this goes much beyond Thursday, we're going to have to sit down with customers and have a very hard conversation," he said. "We'll have to try to recover those marginal costs."

It's not just trucks that are affected. Some 50 freight trains each day rumble up and down the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway tracks paralleling much of I-5. Some of those trains have been diverted over Stampede and Stevens passes, BNSF spokesman Gus Melonas said, but statewide 40 percent of freight rail traffic has been affected by the flooding.

BNSF hopes to resume freight shipments up and down the I-5 corridor sometime today, Melonas said.

Drew DeSilver: 206-464-3145 or ddesilver@seattletimes.com