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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883
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Mount Spokane road open

Keith Piccioni, of the Washington Department of Transportation, picks up barricades after the newly repaired section of state Route 206 is reopened just outside Mount Spokane State Park on Thursday. Snowmelt in Deadman Creek washed out the road May 18, cutting off the park. (Jesse Tinsley / The Spokesman-Review)
Meghann M. Cuniff And Thomas Clouse Staff writers
Keith Piccioni, of the Washington Department of Transportation, picks up barricades after the newly repaired section of state Route 206 is reopened just outside Mount Spokane State Park on Thursday. Snowmelt in Deadman Creek washed out the road May 18, cutting off the park. (Jesse Tinsley / The Spokesman-Review)

The road to Mount Spokane State Park is back.

The public can now access the park thanks to emergency repairs to state Route 206, which was washed out this month by floodwater that overwhelmed a culvert. The road will be paved this summer as part of a permanent fix, transportation officials said.

People living on the mountain were able to use the road beginning May 22, four days after it closed, said resident Lisa Pirkkala.

“(The state Department of Transportation) did a fabulous job,” Pirkkala said. “My hats are off to them.”

About 1,000 feet of roadway was washed out May 18, rendering the road impassable and leaving about a dozen residents, including Pirkkala, unable to either access or leave their homes.

But residents made do, Pirkkala said.

“For many of the homeowners it was more of an adventure,” she said. “Mother Nature came and threw us a curveball.”

Some stayed put; others drove their cars as far as they could, walked across the closed portion of the road, and had friends pick them up on the other side, Pirkkala said.

“For me, it was an inconvenience but not a disaster,” she said. “We were kind of thinking it was odd that there was so much media attention.”

The washed-out road prompted Gov. Chris Gregoire to declare a state of emergency in Spokane County, which enabled the Department of Transportation to bypass the bid process and immediately hire a contractor to work on repairs. That contractor installed a 4-foot culvert, which rerouted the floodwater back into Deadman Creek.

The contractor then rebuilt the damaged roadway with fill material, said Al Gilson, spokesman for WSDOT.

Before the repair, crews filled and stacked 1,400 sandbags to redirect the water flow, which was estimated at 38,000 gallons a minute.

The contractor used about 3,000 cubic yards of dirt and rock to rebuild the roadbed. That required some 200 dump truck loads of fill, 30 truck loads of rock and 20 truck loads of gravel to create the driving surface, Gilson said.

The cost of the repairs was estimated at $1 million.

The permanent repair work set for this summer will be coordinated with an already-scheduled road construction project for a 1-mile section inside the park in hopes of minimizing traffic effects, Gilson said.