Posted: May 18, 2007
Corn Syrup spill causes a sticky situation on US 97 in Toppenish
At about 8:30 a.m. on Friday, May 11, a pick up truck hauling a container of corn syrup turned left too quickly and tipped the container over, out of the truck and onto US 97 in Toppenish where it broke open and spilled. Two hundred gallons of the sticky liquid was covering the northbound left turn lane of US 97 where it intersects with Fort Road. The southbound lanes were splashed with the sweetener and traffic spread the liquid down the southbound lanes a few hundred feet.
A Yakima Tribal Police officer and a Washington State Trooper called for help and WSDOT’s Ryan Miller arrived at the scene and closed the southbound lanes and the northbound left turn lane of US 97 at 8:50 a.m. WSDOT maintenance crews covered the spill with an absorbent material (Floor Dry) to soak up the spill. The southbound lanes were opened at 9:20 but the northbound left turn lane needed an extra dose of Floor Dry, sand and water before the spill was cleared. No collisions were reported and all lanes were open and back to normal at 1:35 p.m.
Posted: May 4, 2007
Tow Scraping Save on SR 520
WSDOT Incident Response Team proved that no obstacle is too large to get traffic moving again on SR 520. At 8:55 a.m. IRT drivers, George Rondeau and Steve Cloud, responded to a one car rollover collision on westbound SR 520 at I-405. They found the smashed vehicle lying on its top with spilled paint in its wake. Both drivers assisted with funneling traffic into two lanes and waited for an opportunity to clear the road.
Traffic quickly started to back up on the heavily-used state route. After the fire unit cleared the scene at 9:14 a.m., WSDOT IRT sprung into action. George hitched the upside down vehicle to his truck and scraped the vehicle off the freeway on its top. With this obstacle cleared Steve got to work on the paint spill.
“I put down some Floor Dry absorbent on the road to soak up the paint so people wouldn’t have paint all over their vehicles when we reopened the lanes,” Steve said.
With this quick work completed lanes reopened to traffic by 9:35 a.m. Both drivers then returned to their routes on SR 520 and I-405 after a job well done.