Oregon Public Broadcasting

State transportation workers spent another morning clearing ice and snow from freeways around Oregon. 

As Pete Springer reports, ODOT took a lot of heat for closing southbound I-205 Tuesday during rush hour.

ODOT highway crews were not very popular with motorists and truckers Tuesday afternoon.

That’s because they completely shut down I-205 southbound in the Portland-area for almost ten miles so they could clear it.

Peter Murphy is a spokesman for ODOT.  He says the timing wasn’t the best, but crews had no other choice.

Peter Murphy: “The ruts that were already building up in the ice that was on the highway -- which were as much as six inches deep -- would have been a terrible traffic problem for the people who would have found themselves out there without some kind of aid.  So our decision was to put these crews out there and push as much as we could out of the way.”

Closing the freeway created a traffic jam that went for miles -- all the way to downtown Portland -- and lasted for hours.