Crews clean up after avalanche

Mother Nature can be awesome, but she doesn't clean up after herself.

Who does? Washington Department of Transportation road crews, that's who.

Over the past two days they've been working 12-hour shifts, scattering themselves along soggy stretches of highway, cleaning away debris — surely an acronym for the mix of dirt, earth, brush, rocks, ice and snow hurled across the lines of commerce.

They've seen it all — but most impressive of all may have been what used to be the Hyak ski run just off Interstate 90, where an avalanche uprooted the popular slope, tearing apart two ski towers and damaging homes on the way down.

Interstate 90 was buried several feet deep in some places, with the last slide occurring at 7:30 a.m. Thursday. Don Whitehouse, a regional administrator for the state transportation department, said he expected I-90 to reopen by this morning.

"This definitely raised everyone's awareness of what could happen up here," said Whitehouse.

The avalanche happened late Wednesday morning, and almost immediately, Whitehouse pulled his workers off a five-mile section of roadway, realizing the potential danger.

This wasn't just melting snow, but soil erosion, Whitehouse said: Seven inches of rain saturated a deep layer of soil, and it slipped out from under the mountain like a rug pulled from under furniture. At the base, the crumpled remains of a majestic log cabin's deck and hot tub lay strewed amid the rubble; another home had been shoved off its foundations.

"The locals here have never seen anything like this," Whitehouse said.

Incredibly, no one was injured. A man inside the relocated house was evacuated, along with several other residents, but luckily, homes in the area were largely empty.

Upon seeing the damage, Snoqualmie Pass Fire and Rescue Assistant Fire Chief Jay Wiseman said to himself: "I can't believe it's Hyak."

But transportation crews were soon back to their Sisyphean task of clearing I-90 and other roadways.

Smaller roads — for instance, Highway 906 at Hyak — will take longer to clear. "We just had a big gush of water that came down and didn't stay in the ditch," Whitehouse said.

The force of the slide caused the road to buckle and crack. It caved in on both sides, crumbling like a piece of flatbread.

"Our main goal is to get the freeway open, and then we'll fix this up," Whitehouse said.

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com