NORTH BEND, Wash. — Eastbound Interstate 90 is back open after crews conducted avalanche control Wednesday afternoon.
The eastbound lanes reopened Wednesday morning following an overnight closure due to multiple crashes and hazardous travel conditions over Snoqualmie Pass, before closing agains around 3 p.m.
They reopened again around 6 p.m.
Westbound I-90 was also closed for several hours between North Bend and Ellensburg early Wednesday, but reopened around 6:30 a.m.
Crashes forced initial closure
A Washington State Patrol (WSP) Trooper was struck and injured after a driver struck his patrol car while he was at the scene of a different collision on eastbound I-90 at around midnight on Tuesday. The driver was traveling at freeway speeds, according to WSP Trooper Rick Johnson. The trooper was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The driver was not injured and is being investigated for possible impairment.
A three-vehicle collision happened at around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday night about ten miles east, at milepost 38 after a pickup truck lost control on the roadway. A picture taken by Johnson shows a semi-truck was also involved in the collision. Injuries were reported, but it is unknown how many people were injured or what the nature of their injuries was.
Johnson advised people not to drive if they don't have to.
"Take it SLOW!!" he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. "Treacherous driving right now."
In an interview with KING 5, Johnson confirmed that there have been more crashes west of the closure area and advised that temperatures can change rapidly leading to varying road conditions along the highway within short distances.
"I think people are lulled into a sense of, 'It's not closed here, it's not going to be slippery,' but it's very slippery everywhere," Johnson said. "You come through from Issaquah heading to North Bend and you hit these little micro-climates where, we know as troopers, that the temperature will drop five, six, seven degrees and all of a sudden you're back in ice again."