Freeway changed Yakima Valley forever

YAKIMA — Twenty years after officials cut a ribbon symbolically opening Interstate 82 through the lower Yakima Valley, one thing is certain: The highway has forever altered the area's rural lifestyle.

In two decades, the freeway has attracted businesses and closed others. It has improved the flow of traffic and brought more. It has hurt the environment and, in places, helped it.

And it has connected small and large communities that once were more insular.

"Yakima was a once-a-month experience as a kid," says Maury Lange, a retired real-estate agent who grew up in Grandview, Yakima County. Today, people commute from Grandview to Yakima every day.

On Oct. 29, 1982, a 45-mile section of the highway connecting Union Gap, Yakima County, with Prosser, Benton County, was opened, completing a 24-year process that linked the entire Yakima Valley with the interstate system.

Initially, the highway was touted as a way to link Puget Sound military bases with the Hanford nuclear reservation and the Umatilla Chemical Depot in Oregon.

It did that, but it also produced results unforeseen at the time.

By funneling traffic away from its historical patterns, businesses and towns along the old roadways were driven under or marginalized.

Most of the cities in the Yakima Valley once boasted busy downtowns with clothing and shoe stores and movie theaters that have long since closed. The freeway made it quick and easy for shoppers to drive to the bigger stores in Yakima and the Tri-Cities.

In 1999, the change forced Mary DaCorsi to close her Prosser bookstore, which had been in her family for 40 years.

"I could not buy (books) cheaper than Costco could sell them," says DaCorsi.

But the interstate attracted other businesses and helped lure a variety of industry.

Large employers, such as Darigold, CanAm Steel and the future Wal-Mart distribution center partially credit the freeway in their decisions to locate here.

The freeway also affected the environment.

Its construction was blamed for drying up several wells along the Yakima River, which the state had to redrill. And the interstate contributed to the sprawl of cities, chewing up agricultural land and delicate shrub-steppe habitat, says Adam Fryall, president of the Tapteal Greenway Association in the Tri-Cities.

The interstate cuts off wetlands from the river, especially near Zillah and Buena in Yakima County. Those marshy backwaters provide habitat for amphibians, fish and small mammals, as well as filtering water flowing into the river.

Meantime, the freeway berm acts as a dike for the northern bank, which does not allow floodwaters to dissipate, seep into the ground and replenish the river during the hot summer, says Lynn Hatcher, fisheries director for the Yakama Nation.

"Overall, I'd say it's been a detriment to the ecosystem," Hatcher told the Yakima Herald-Republic.

Still, he cites a few benefits. The freeway has protected the Zillah bluffs from erosion and has discouraged development between the roadbed and river, creating an unofficial preserve.

Also, the state turned the interstate's construction quarries into ponds, which are now stocked with fish and provide nesting grounds for osprey, says Dan Kinney of the Yakima Audubon Society.

DaCorsi of Prosser considers the Yakima Valley better for the interstate, even though it cost her the family business. She figures it has attracted industry that one day will lure enough tourists to support a bookstore like the one she closed three years ago.

"Nobody likes change, but you have to have change to have progress," she said.