The westbound Tacoma Narrows Bridge heading from Tacoma to Gig Harbor will be down to two lanes Friday and Saturday for another round of emergency repairs, a Washington State Department of Transportation news release says.

Transportation officials warned drivers to anticipate “significant congestion approaching the bridge during the afternoon commute Friday.”

“Drivers should add extra travel time to help prevent delays or consider combining or postponing discretionary trips,” the news release says.

Two right lanes heading toward the bridge and the Jackson Avenue on-ramp will be blocked from 8 a.m. Friday to 10 p.m. Saturday, per the release. All drivers will be able to use the HOV lane.

Crews will repair an expansion joint on the surface of the bridge’s westbound span and pour new concrete, the release says. Expansion joints allow bridges to naturally expand and contract due to changes in temperature or other forces, WSDOT spokesperson April Leigh confirmed.

Built in 1950, the westbound span of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is aging and required several lane closures for repairs last year, including in January, May, June and December.

Not all of these repairs targeted the same expansion joint, of which the bridge has many. Four large expansion joints called “finger joints” are located near the westbound bridge’s towers, and smaller joints called “wave joints” are located approximately every 160 feet across the bridge, Leigh said.

“The location of the repair we are scheduled to complete this weekend is next to the repairs made in December last year on one of the finger joints near Tower 5,” she wrote in an email.

A 2024 WSDOT blog post about the bridge’s history and condition emphasizes that the department is struggling to obtain the funding for long-term repairs to infrastructure like the Narrows Bridge, though crews perform routine inspections and short-term maintenance.

One project targeting the westbound bridge’s expansion joints has been delayed due to lack of funding, the post says. Tolls that the department collects from traffic crossing the bridge toward Tacoma can only go toward repaying what was spent to build the eastbound span of the bridge, which opened in 2007.

An average of 45,000 vehicles cross the bridge daily, the blog post says.

“We’d do all the repairs over the weekend if we could,” WSDOT said in a Facebook post Tuesday. “Unfortunately, we’re on a tight schedule with the few folks who can do the work under the bridge deck, hundreds of feet above the water line. Expect major backups during the Friday afternoon commute.”

This story was originally published September 17, 2025 at 5:00 AM.