This just in from WSDOT (in an earlier email, they mentioned that if all goes well, they hope to open the N. Cascades Hwy by Memorial Day weekend): It’s Dustin, from the west side, bringing you an update on our snow-clearing progress. .. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to any of you, but we’re still getting snow. Yup, it’s almost May and we’re still doing avalanche control in the passes. Fun times. I just got off the phone with Dean Hills, maintenance superintendent out of Wenatchee. … Hills said that we’ve nearly finished cutting through the Cutthroat Ridge avalanche chutes. We’re through CR 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. The two full-size snowblowers have a little work remaining at CR 10 before they’re through, and we have about an hour’s worth of pushing with the D8 cats at CR 11 and CR 12. Once the cats have finished pushing and cut the slides down to manageable sizes, the excavator and snowblowers can punch through pretty quickly. Then it’s on to what we call the Annex – the area where avalanches from Liberty Bell reach the highway a second time. Hills believes we should reach the Annex quickly next week. We’re finding a lot of debris in the avalanches so far. While it’s not too much of a problem for the cats and excavator, it is a problem for our snowblowers. The debris breaks a lot of sheer pins on the blades of the snowblowers. Each time we break a sheer pin, we have to stop and replace it, slowing us down. For a better idea of what a sheer pin is, check out this picture first, and then look at this close-up. A bigger bucket for the excavator is supposed to arrive on Monday. We’re bringing it in from Euphrata – it’s normally used for ditching. Supposedly, it’s twice the size of the normal bucket. That’ll help move more snow more quickly. As for the west side, Gary Claybo and Gary Ward tell me that we’re all the way to milepost 152. We stopped using the loader-mounted blower Wednesday because the snow was getting too deep – more than 5 feet deep. We brought in a full-size snowblower from Stevens Pass on Wednesday and put it to work. Gary Claybo says the full-size blower should speed snow removal up a bit. However, Gary Ward thinks we’ll get slowed down once we reach milepost 155 because there’s a fairly large slide there. …We got a few new pictures from the west side this week. Have a great weekend.
Related posts:
Leave a Reply