Milk, fish, a fatality and a massive traffic jam: How Friday’s I-5 snarl paralyzed us
The trouble started with a foolish, fatal mistake: A 63-year-old pedestrian tried to cross the northbound lanes of Interstate 5 near Fife at 3:50 a.m., before the sun rose on the morning commute.
William Gladue was struck by two cars, and pronounced dead at the scene, said Washington State Patrol Trooper Robert Reyer.
The fatal collision started a chain reaction. Two tractor-trailers caught in the sudden traffic jam were hit by a third tractor-trailer near 54th Avenue East. One rig was carrying 30,000 pounds of fish. The other was hauling milk or heavy cream, which spilled onto the freeway, Reyer said. The driver of the third tractor-trailer was cited for second-degree negligent driving.
The resulting mess paralyzed Pierce County roads for most of the day. The freeway had to be shut down for 10 hours. The dangerous mixture of fish and milk created slick conditions, and forced a time-consuming environmental clean-up.
Traffic impact
Drivers around the region soon found themselves trapped in backups, as side roads and alternate routes absorbed cars seeking an escape hatch.
Some cars’ tires passing the crash dragged the dairy spillage on the road along Interstate-5, stretching the clean-up zone 1.5 miles, Reyer estimated.
Going north, the freeway was impassable until about 2:55 p.m., from south of Fife to the King County/Pierce County line. Reyer said it took three hours to clear the pedestrian collision and seven hours and 40 minutes to clean up the dairy spill.
The three-tractor-trailer collision blocked all five lanes northbound, Reyer said. Drivers were rerouted to 54th Avenue East and side roads up to King County, where they were allowed to get back onto Interstate-5.
Commuters saw an average delay of an hour to an hour and a half. Traffic was stopped and backed up all the way to South 56th Street, about seven miles from the crash, Reyer said.
Many decided to avoid Interstate-5, and take state Route 167 into King County.
That choice created new huge stop-and-go backups on state Routes 512 and 167. The lines of brake lights State Route 167 was stretched all the way up to Jovita Boulevard East near Edgewood, Reyer said.
A crash that shuts down the whole road for 10 hours is uncommon, Reyer said. In his four years as a state trooper, he said he has never seen a collision block the highway for that long.
Clean-up
The dairy product made the roads icy.
“I guess the fatty parts of the cream or milk turned the road into an ice rink,” Reyer said.
Dairy is toxic to fish. Clean-up crews couldn’t just wash the milk off the highway and let stormwater drains carry it into Puget Sound. Some of the milky gunk had filtered into Hylebos Creek by the time crews arrived.
Some of the spill into the creek couldn’t be stopped, said Ty Keltner, spokesperson for the state Department of Ecology’s Spills Prevention, Preparedness and Response program.
“Not a lot we can do to clean up a spill like that. It’s water soluble. There is no way to separate the milk from the water, it’s not like an oil spill,” he said.
Keltner couldn’t say how much cream ended up in Hylebos Creek, which flows into Commencement Bay. While he said the Department of Ecology is not too concerned, it’s still a hazard.
“It doesn’t have a long term impact to the Puget Sound. It will dilute,” Keltner said. “One thing that people might think is, ‘How come it’s hazardous, people drink milk.’ Anything you dump into a stream in that quantity is going to impact the environment. That’s why we don’t want to make it worse.”
The state Department of Transportation used sand to soak up the cream on the highway, Reyer said. Fans bound the sand and dairy together, making it easier for street sweepers to clean.
“It was done multiple times to get that icy feel off the road,” Reyer said.
Some milk was carried off as runoff, so crews had to vacuum out the milk or cream from the stormwater drain pipes with “vactor trucks,” Keltner said. The truck caught the spillage and pumped it into the tank. Seven storm drains were cleaned, he said.
One of the semi-trailers also had a diesel fuel spill, WSDOT said. Reyer said the diesel spill was nothing out of the ordinary during a collision.
The fish were easier to clean up.The 30,000 pounds of fish were in boxes, and when the trailer tipped to the left and cracked open, not many ended up on the highway, Reyer said. The haul was reloaded into a dump truck and sent to waste.
“It was supposed to be food, but it was dumped,” he said.
This story was originally published May 8, 2021 at 2:02 PM with the headline "Milk, fish, a fatality and a massive traffic jam: How Friday’s I-5 snarl paralyzed us."
