Hwy 35 wreck stirs memories of fuel spill

FINLEY POINT — It wasn’t much more than a year ago that East Shore residents watched a semi truck tanker crash and spill thousands of gallons of fuel on the narrow, two-lane road near their homes, spurring millions of dollars in cleanup efforts.

When yet another truck and pup flipped off the side of the highway on Monday morning, concerned residents saw history repeating itself.

The northbound semi crash occurring shortly after 10 a.m. at milemarker 4.5 raised only moderate spill impact concerns, being roughly a mile from the April 2, 2008 tanker crash site. The truck, transporting dry powder cement, did not spill the trailer’s contents and only a minimal amount of diesel fuel from the truck ran onto the highway pavement before volunteer firefighters with the Finley Point-Yellow Bay Fire Department spread absorbent material over the leakage.

Montana Highway Patrol Trooper Aaron Day reported that the truck’s driver, Robert Fry, stated that he swerved to miss two deer on the roadway. The 61-year-old Columbia Falls man was transported by ambulance with minor injuries to St. Joseph Medical Center and released later on Monday.

The truck traveling northbound from Missoula to Kalispell is operated by highway construction firm LHC Inc., of Kalispell.

Trooper Day reported that he was advised by the Lake County Sheriff’s Office that crews were out at the crash site through Monday night attempting to right and remove the vehicle. Traffic was limited to one-lane along the stretch of highway Monday evening until the truck was withdrawn around 11 p.m. that night.

Following the April 2008 crash, which spilled about 6,000 gallons of fuel onto properties alongside the highway and forced five families from their homes (many of which still remain evacuated today) because of the contamination, many East Shore residents started a push to ban oversize and over-length vehicles from Highway 35.

In response, the Montana Department of Transportation held a pair of meetings in Somers and Polson which drew hundreds of people to discuss the issue.

“The problem has not gone away,” said East Shore resident Rose Schwenneson after Monday’s crash. “Something has to be done.”

Schwenneson, and her husband, Don, who helped coordinate area residents’ efforts for the ban, said the state’s tests to determine the highway’s safety didn’t get to the truth of the matter.

“That type of traffic configuration with the large, longer trucks with pups is not appropriate for the East Shore any longer,” she said.

During last summer’s meetings, MDOT Director Jim Lynch presented a mountain of information about both Highway 35 and Highway 93 designed to give residents on both roads a full picture of traffic around Flathead Lake. Among those facts were:

• The West Shore between Polson and Somers has 498 total access points onto Highway 93 (roads/streets, driveways and farm/ranch accesses). The East Shore between Polson and Bigfork has 648. That comes out to 11 per mile on Highway 93 and 19.1 per mile on Highway 35.

• Between 1999 and 2008, the Average Annual Daily Traffic Count — the number of vehicles on the road - has slightly decreased on Highway 35 since a peak in 2004-2005 and has stayed fairly constant along Highway 93.

•The truck crash rate is almost identical on both highways, at just over one crash per million vehicle miles of travel. But Highway 93’s rate is slightly higher than the state average for non-interstate highways routes and Highway 35’s is slightly below the state average for the Montana primary routes system.

• The crash rate for all vehicles is higher on the East Shore, at about 1.5 per million vehicle miles traveled to the West Shore’s 1.3 per million.

Earlier this year the MDOT concluded its study of the road — which included videotaping trucks as they traveled the serpentine route — and decided not to recommend any changes.

Bigfork Eagle Editor Alex Strickland contributed to this report.