If you frequent the mountain passes in Western Washington during the winter months, chances are you may have been stopped due to avalanche control work by WSDOT.
This year the WSDOT crew at Snoqualmie Pass has only had to conduct three avalanche control missions because of the relatively tame winter.
“Most of our avalanche control is done with a tram system. So, it will be a cable that runs from one point to another and the explosive hangs from that cable,” John Stimberis, the avalanche control supervisor for WSDOT at Snoqualmie Pass, said. For areas that aren’t as accessible, they use old military cannons.
“Howitzer is like an old surplus military weapon. It’s like a cannon. Like shooting a projectile with shrapnel and everything like that,” he said.
But before we get to explosives and firing off cannons, there’s a lot of leg work that goes into determining if crews need to get out and conduct avalanche control. Stimberis said it all begins with snow measurements.
“We dig in, we want to see those layers of the snowpack,” he said. He said when they look at layers of snow they note the differences between the layers and how hard they are.
“So like I can push my finger into it but maybe not four fingers so it’s fairly dense snow and then we can see some of these older layers in here,” he said. If layers are bonded well together, there’s less risk of an avalanche.
“We were watching this layer for a little while but the bond became really good and it wasn’t really an issue for us and then we had some further down in the snowpack that were a concern until recently but now with settlement, warming, little bit of rain going into the snowpack that is also established a good bond,” he said.
Stimberis said the current risk for avalanches is low, but they’re keeping an eye out because if the weather changes so will conditions.
“We’re getting into that situation now where you have a little bit of a crust over the top and additional new snow on that could create an avalanche problem so that’s something we’re looking at now and thinking about the future,” he said.
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