Thursday, October 1, 2026

Orange barrels and 92 million sheets of toilet paper: A busy summer with our maintenance crews

By: Tina Werner, WSDOT maintenance communications

Summertime = busy, am I right?

Whether it was cheering on your favorite sports team, camping in the mountains or hopping on a ferry, we’re sure you were busy these past few months. No matter where you went, chances are you encountered something else along the way.

Orange barrels. And lots of them.

Some of those barrels marked major construction projects. Others marked something much smaller, but no less important. An overnight pothole repair. Freshly painted lane markings. Guardrail replacement. A broken picnic table at a rest area that needed to be fixed.

Behind many of those orange barrels were some of the people who quietly keep Washington moving every day: our highway maintenance crews.

A nighttime view of a maintenance work zone where a worker wearing high-visibility gear operates a large vacuum hose on the highway.
Maintenance crews used a “hydromill” while repairing potholes along eastbound Interstate 90 near Spokane this summer. This equipment allows crews to quickly remove rough sections of the road and pour new pavement during a single shift.

A worker operates equipment that paints a white stripe to the highway. The worker is in orange safety gear and a white hard hat in a closed work zone.
A crew member stripes southbound State Route 302 in Gig Harbor to allow for a new bike and pedestrian lane for safety. This work was prompted by citizen and partner agency requests, and an overall increase in all travel modes on SR 302.


Summer stats
Our crews repair signs, clear vegetation, sweep roads, remove fallen or dead trees, repair traffic signals, inspect drainage systems, collect bagged litter and patch thousands of potholes. They are also the same crews that plow highways in the winter and respond when wildfires, floods and other emergencies strike.

A wooden traffic sign lays in the road due to wildfire damage with smoke in the background. The roadway is closed and there is small debris on the ground.
During the eastern Washington wildfires this summer, our maintenance crews helped close roads and documented and repaired damage like these burned signs.

They also help with some out-of-the ordinary tasks as well. This included staffing road or ramp closures for international soccer matches or – and we’re not making this up – when a semi full of corn spilled onto the road.

A highway scene under an overcast sky showing an overturned semi-truck that has spilled corn across the travel lanes and concrete barrier.
Oh shucks! Maintenance crews help clean up after a corn spill along the southbound I-5 ramp to Thorne Lane in July.
So, what did our crews accomplish this year? A lot.

From June 1, through Aug. 31, 2026, they:

  • Completed 1.6 million square feet of pavement repairs
  • Painted 5,301 lane miles of road stripes, helping keep travel lanes clearly marked
  • Painted more than 40,000 pavement markings, totaling nearly 1,100 miles. This includes things like arrows, crosswalks and stop bars that improve bicycle and pedestrian safety.
  • Removed 1,498 hazardous or dead trees to improve safety and visibility – a 27% increase from last summer
  • Swept 3,805 miles of roadway to clear small debris – a 1% increase from last summer
  • Installed 855 guideposts, providing 431 miles of lane delineation along state highways
  • Repaired 1,109 highway lights
  • Repaired 471 traffic signals
  • Inspected, cleaned or repaired 7,209 catch basins to help prevent flooding before the rainy season
  • Repaired 86 culverts, separate from our fish passage work which is completed as part of new construction projects
  • Removed 346,442 square feet of graffiti
  • Flew 88 drone flights to document disaster damage or inspect hard-to-reach areas and help identify repairs
  • Collected 318 tons of trash – the equivalent of about 42,351 full litter bags. ( Litter is picked up by Ecology crews and Adopt-A-Highway volunteers and then our Maintenance crews gather and dispose of the bags)
  • All told, crews logged 53,815 unique work entries for highway maintenance tasks statewide.

And then there are the rest areas, which get a workout each summer.

  • This summer, travelers flushed our safety rest area toilets about 9.2 million times .
  • They also used about 92 million sheets of toilet paper – enough to stretch from Olympia to Spokane and back, with enough left over to gift-wrap Mount Rainier.
  • Crews also supplied 3,648 gallons of hand soap . That’s enough to fill 730 five-gallon buckets. Or enough soap for Washington’s largest-ever bubble party. You decide.

Workers in bright orange safety gear and white hard hats stand outside along a highway ramp holding a length of guardrail with a repair truck parked nearby.
Crews replaced damaged guardrail from the SR 7 ramp to northbound I-5 in Tacoma. Crews also cut back vegetation, swept the road and cleaned up large debris during the five-hour closure.

The heroes of our highways
Nearly 1,500 highway maintenance workers are stationed from Forks to Pullman and everywhere else in between. These are our boots-on-the-ground crews. Many live in the communities where they work, travel the same roads you do and often work behind the scenes to make sure those roads you depend on remain safe and reliable.

At a high level, they are responsible for maintaining:

  • Nearly 19,000 lane miles
  • 47 safety rest areas
  • 3,502 state-owned bridges
  • 55 tunnels
  • 1,616 traffic signal systems (flashing beacons, traffic signals, etc.)
  • 3,250 highway lights
  • 278 ramp meters
  • 946 electronic highway signs
  • 26 weigh stations
  • Nearly 100,000 acres of rights of way

Their planned, daily workload can change in an instant depending on weather conditions, collisions, emergencies or whatever else lands on Washington’s highways – like corn.

In other words, their job description is a never-ending to-do list. Their work is prioritized based on safety.

The work doesn’t stop when the sun goes down
Our maintenance crews work around the clock to keep people moving. That includes working at night when it’s safe to do so. It’s a balance of making repairs when traffic volumes are lower (where possible) and keeping our crews safe and making emergency repairs when we need to.

We know what some of you might be thinking: “Well, aren’t you just doing your job, WSDOT?”

Yep. We are. We also think there’s value in showing you what that job actually looks like. They’ll keep doing all this work and more, but they need your help.

A highway worker in a high-visibility safety jacket stands on an empty roadway monitoring another crew member inside a raised bucket truck lift repairing a ceiling light fixture inside a tunnel.
Maintenance crews repair overhead lights in the I- 5 Seattle Convention Center tunnel following a series of international soccer matches in the area.

Every orange barrel represents work to help keep travelers and goods moving across our state. These same barrels are protecting crews, who are working just feet away from moving traffic. These workers could be your neighbor. Your friend. Your relative. Next time you are traveling through a work zone, please slow down, pay attention and give them room to work safely.


A worker in a high-visibility safety jacket stands in the roadway holding a red stop sign to direct traffic safely through the work zone.
A maintenance worker holds a stop sign to help direct traffic along SR 20 while crews add fresh striping to the highway this summer.

Join us

Does this work and photos we shared look fun? If you’re looking for work that makes a difference in communities across Washington, we’re hiring! Learn more about joining our highway maintenance team online.

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