WHEN THE FOG ROLLS OVER THE KNIK RIVER, FORMING ICE ON THE GLENN HIGHWAY, THE STAGE IS SET TO CATCH THE UNAWARE ON ALASKA'S ...
INFAMOUS BRIDGE
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Anchorage Daily News (AK)-December 9, 1990
Author/Byline: DUSTY RHODES
Daily News reporter
Staff
Edition: Final
Section: Nation
Page: A1
If he knew then what he knows now, Paul Dollar might have looked at the strip of fog lying there where the Glenn Highway should have been and seen it as a danger sign.
But Dollar had lived in Anchorage just a month; he didn't know.
"Look at that fog," Dollar said to Larry Wahl, his fishing buddy occupying the passenger seat. "It looks neat, hanging in there so thick, you know?"
The backdrop of mountains, the glorious sunshine and the fog along the river made such a pretty panorama, Dollar slowed down and Wahl took out his camera and clicked off a couple of shots as they drove onto the Knik River bridge.
Dollar saw lights flashing through the fog. He slowed down to 40, then 20 miles an hour. Cars crazily parked at different angles blocked his lane. Before he could come to a complete stop, Dollar's truck got rammed from the rear and shoved into another car. Behind him, cars were "spinning like tops."
When all the skidding, sliding and smashing stopped, the bridge was strewn with five trucks, nine cars, a van and a trailer, all mangled and tangled up together.
The Thanksgiving Saturday pileup injured eight people, including one man still in Providence Hospital's intensive-care unit and another man who jumped off the bridge to avoid being hit by a skidding truck.
What Dollar didn't know is that that bridge the first of three bridges spanning the Knik River as the Glenn Highway winds north from Anchorage is one of the most infamous stretches of road in Alaska.
But he knows now.
"Everyone I talk to about it, they don't have nothing good to say about that bridge," Dollar says.
Bob Peterson, a Sea-Land trucker who drives all over Alaska, names the bridge as one of the three most dangerous sections of road in the state (Glenn Highway's steep descent to the Eagle River turnoff and an 11-mile stretch between Seward and Soldotna are the other two).
"I live in Wasilla, so I also commute back and forth, and every time I cross that bridge I'm afraid I'm going to meet somebody falling asleep or losing control because it's always slippery and foggy," he says.
Hank Bartos, the man who jumped off the bridge in the Thanksgiving Saturday accident, has been hearing the same kind of horror stories in his hometown of North Pole.
"About every third person I talk to, somebody recalls an incident over the past two or three years that happened on that bridge," Bartos says.
Low, straight and less than a third of a mile long, the bridge looks innocent enough, stretched out across the braided waters of the Knik. But it's situated at a spot where currents collide currents of commuters rushing to work or back home, and currents of cold air and warm water that combine to create the thick fog and slick ice that are the bridge's winter wardrobe.
When the bridge opened in 1965, the communities of Palmer, Wasilla and Big Lake, north of the bridge, had a combined population of about 1,330. About 1,000 vehicles a day traveled between the Old Glenn junction and Eklutna, according to the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities. Studies at that time suggested that in 20 years, the "average daily traffic" on that section of road would be about 6,000 vehicles.
By 1989, however, those three towns had grown to more than 8,200 and evolved into sort of bedroom communities of Anchorage.
Traffic flow across the bridge increased twice as fast: The same shoulderless, two-lane bridge that carried an average of 1,000 vehicles a day in 1965 carried an average of almost 16,000 vehicles a day last year, according to the transportation department.
"It was obvious that it had outlived its design life," says Mike Tooley, assistant highway design chief for the department's central region.
The fog, on the other hand, didn't have to increase; it was bad enough from the start. Russ Page, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, explains why:
"That part of the river is susceptible to tidal changes that are more than enough to crack the ice. So there are breaks in the ice leads or channels and there's always moisture in the air.
"At the mouth of the Knik Arm is Knik Glacier, so you've got a lot of cold air. Cold air drains downhill just like water, and it acts kind of like a cap to trap whatever moisture there is escaping (from the river). Every time there's open water exposed to cold air, you get fog," Page says.
Another fog theory, espoused mainly by Alaska State Troopers, blames the Eklutna Power Project, about four miles upstream from the bridge.
Mike Dillon, project manager, acknowledges the plant pours an average of 500 acre-feet of water per day into the Knik River. But Eklutna Power Project is a hydroplant, which uses water merely to turn turbines, not to generate steam. The plant doesn't warm the water at all; it's about 34 degrees Fahrenheit when it leaves the plant, Dillon says.
"And when it comes to the amount of water we put in (the river) relative to the tidal fluctuation, it's a drop in the bucket," he says. "The power plant is not the cause of the fog; the cause of the fog is natural conditions."
Put all these factors together fog, ice, heavy traffic, hurried commuters and an occasional meandering moose or two and it's no wonder the bridge has earned such a bad reputation.
"It scares me to death," says Kay Rawlings, a Wasilla resident who works as a document librarian in Anchorage. "It's just an awful bridge. Nobody slows down for it. Visibility is really poor there and it's always slick. And there's no enforcement (of the speed limit). People are driving way too fast."
Chris Kepler, the Department of Transportation and Public Facilities maintenance supervisor for Palmer, says his office has received complaints about the bridge for years, usually at the rate of about 10 calls a month during winter.
"It is a real dangerous crossing, that bridge, because people go into the fog at different speeds and get surprised by people going slow or fast in relation to them and they hit each other," Kepler says.
In recent months, borough boundaries have been realigned and jurisdiction over the bridge has been transferred to the Anchorage Police Department. But for years, Alaska State Troopers were responsible for handling all the accidents on the bridge.
Sgt. Wayne Schober, a trooper stationed in Palmer the past eight years, can't even count the number of times he's had to mop up wrecks on the bridge.
"I don't have that many toes," he cracks. "Just say "dozens.' And that's just me. We've got two other shifts (of troopers). It's not a good situation, no doubt about it. We've had lots of accidents on that bridge."
It's impossible to determine exactly how many wrecks have occurred on the bridge. State Department of Transportation data show a mere 34 wrecks actually on the bridge between January 1979 and December 1989.
However, those statistics are based on accident reports submitted by Alaska State Troopers, and Schober admits that pinpointing location is not always top priority for a trooper at an accident scene. Schober says the statistics also don't reflect the innumerable wrecks where both drivers are able and eager to leave before law enforcement officers arrive.
Over the years, various agencies have tried to come up with a "cure" for the bridge's problems.
The Alaska Railroad has studied commuter train service between Mat-Su Borough communities and Anchorage. But that notion was nixed when costs were calculated: Assuming commuters filled every seat on the train, the round-trip fare would be almost $30 a day, according to Dick Knapp, the railroad's vice president for marketing.
"And that's with no markup; that's just to cover direct costs," Knapp says. "We didn't think we could ask people to pay that, nor would they pay that."
The congestion problem may be alleviated in the next few years by the construction of a second bridge and renovation of the current bridge. Keith Morberg, regional design chief for the state's transportation department, says that by October 1993 there should be a pair of two-lane, one-way bridges, complete with 8-foot wide shoulders bordered with special low-intensity lights.
But commuters aren't counting on the new bridges to solve the problem.
"It'll help, but it'll still be a treacherous thing because it'll still be over that stretch of water," says Ken Brown, a Palmer resident who works at Fort Richardson. "That fog comes up so quick, certain times of the night you can't see that fog until you get there."
Shirley Vincent, another Palmer commuter whose car got smashed in the recent pileup (it was her second wreck on the bridge), sees only one benefit the new bridge might offer:
"We'll just hit each other all going the same direction," she says.
In the meantime, the transportation department is trying to make the bridge safe with an assortment of tricks. Last fall, Kepler's crew installed yellow caution signs "FOG 10 mph" at both entrances to the bridge. They decorated the guardrails with battery-powered blinking yellow lights and reflectors spaced every 50 feet. And they use good old-fashioned plowing and sanding on the bridge, too.
Unfortunately, these safety measures can cancel each other out. The sand spread on the pavement sprays up onto the guardrail reflectors, which can't reflect through the thick coat of dirt. Kepler sends his night crew out to swab the reflectors when their schedule allows, and Schober, the Palmer trooper, tells tales of those workers having to jump up on the guardrails to avoid being hit by speeding motorists.
The state transportation department has even given serious consideration to outfitting the bridge with the same sort of pavement-level lights that outline airport runways.
But Mike Tooley, an assistant highway design chief at the transportation department, says the salt in the sanding mixture would quickly corrode the lights. Airports avoid that problem by mixing urea, rather than salt, with their sand. But urea, a fertilizer, costs more than salt.
"It's horribly expensive," Tooley says. "We just couldn't afford to do it."
Trooper Schober has his own theory on how to make the bridge safer. And his idea is cost-free.
"If drivers would not tailgate, we would not have most of the accidents we have. Probably 80 percent of the accidents I've seen were because somebody was following too closely," he says.
"That bridge doesn't leave you any out. There's no shoulder. If a guy hiccups, 10 or 15 people have to dodge and a few of them are going to come in contact with each other."
Record Number: 194598
Copyright (c) 1990, Anchorage Daily News