Another fatality occurred on state Route 6 last weekend. It happened at the Chilvers Road intersection on Saturday when, in a terrible accident, a woman failed to yield to an oncoming truck that was headed west, and was then struck by that same truck, as well as another truck that was headed east towards Chehalis.
A friend on Facebook who drove through shortly after the incident described the wreck as “horrific.” The woman driving the Nissan Sentra was pronounced dead at the scene.
Just a week or so before that, I sat in traffic due to another wreck at the Scheuber Road intersection, just before Chilvers Road. There was a double fatality wreck in 2016 at the Highway 603 intersection, just past Chilvers Road.
Just this past Thursday, I was driving my two boys out to their great-grandparents’ house in Adna. As I passed Scheuber Road, I saw a silver four-door sedan sitting at the Chilvers Road approach, and I could sense the very bad decision the driver of this car was about to make.
As I suspected was going to happen, based on how the driver was behaving at the stop line, the silver four-door sedan entered the intersection — right into my path.
Fortunately, because I grew up wary of our highways, I was able to stomp on the brakes and slow down just enough — down from 55 mph to about 20 to 25 mph — to narrowly avoid a t-bone collision with my kids in the car.
You better believe I about stood up on my steering wheel laying on the horn at that other driver. Sadly, it’s not the first time this has happened to me at that spot and other places on Highway 6.
In fact, my childhood home was located just a couple of miles up the road from the Chilvers Road intersection at Highway 6. When I learned to drive, I explicitly was not allowed to get onto the highway at that intersection, even thought it was the fastest route to town. I was instructed to only get on and off of the highway at the updated and reconfigured intersection at Bunker Creek Road, near Adna High School, until I became a more experienced driver.
My parents worked in law enforcement. They knew the danger and the statistics.
Before the current Adna High School was built, there used to be a traditional highway approach right next to Adna Grocery on Bunker Creek Road. Bunker Creek Road used to basically end there and led up to the highway.
One day, while sitting on the school bus waiting to turn onto the highway, we witnessed a chain reaction rear-end accident right in front of our bus. A brown Subaru wagon was waiting to turn left off of state Route 6 at the old Adna Grocery approach with a pickup truck waiting behind her. The pickup behind her was rear-ended by another truck who failed to stop — a high school student — and the chain of events pushed the Subaru wagon into the oncoming traffic lane where it was struck by another vehicle.
We watched helplessly as two firefighters pulled the two carseats with children in them out of the backseat to be evaluated by emergency medical technicians.
Wrecks like that are the reason that highway approach doesn’t exist anymore — it’s why we have the double lanes and turnout lanes near Adna High School. In fact it wasn’t the first time that particular highway approach had been revised. The shaved barn on Highway 6 at Twin Oaks Road gives you an idea of how the highway was reconfigured previously.
According to the Washington State Department of Transportation’s online data hub, the Traffic GeoPortal, somewhere between an average of 5,000-10,000 vehicles traverse state Route 6 daily. And with the housing boom and continued growth in the Adna area and other places, that traffic is likely to continue to increase, as it has for decades.
I don’t know what it takes to trigger a traffic study for the highway approaches on Highway 6 between Chehalis and Adna. I know that not all approaches can be updated, but the Scheuber Road, Chilvers Road and Highway 603 clump of intersections all near Hillcrest Food Mart seem like a good place to start.
I’m not sure that a stoplight is the answer, like we now see erected in Mossyrock on State Route 12 following the death of Ryan Rashoff, a Mossyrock High School student, in 2009. But I know that other solutions out there have to exist — just like we see near Adna High School now.
If ever there was a place in Lewis County, off of the Interstate, that was consistently problematic and feared — it is our rural highways.
Are you listening County Commissioners and local elected officials? My experiences at these intersections, growing up through the years driving that highway, are not unique. Please amplify our voices to WSDOT.
•••
Brittany Voie is a columnist for The Chronicle. She lives south of Chehalis with her husband and two young sons. She welcomes correspondence from the community at voiedevelopment@comcast.net.
