A recent accident is drawing attention to the plight that residents of May Valley Road south of Issaquah city limits have faced since last autumn.

Last October, the Issaquah City Council voted to reroute semi truck traffic away from Olde Town so that the busy streets of Downtown Issaquah would not be clogged with trucks. May Valley Road was listed in the agenda bill as the primary alternate route from Interstate 90 to the Issaquah-Hobard Road.

In the months since that decision was made, the residents of May Valley Road — especially those with small children who play outside — have lived in fear that a serious accident involving a truck and a resident is only a matter of time.

And this fear was perhaps never more realized than on July 11, when a semi truck rolled over on its side just across the street from the Winterbrook Farm property and not at all far from the properties of residents of the Sunset Valley Farms neighborhood.

“If it had been half a mile earlier, that could’ve been in our yard, where our kids play,” said May Valley Road resident Marina Beckwith Subbaiah, who has two children aged 1 and 4. “It’s not a big reach.”

“We could’ve been walking our dogs, our animals … and out of nowhere been hit by a truck,” said Carmen Thompson, who has lived on May Valley Road for 39 years. “It just changes the whole dynamic of living here.”

Subbaiah pointed out that the road is full of blind turns — nine between State Route 900 and the Issaquah-Hobart Road — and noted that “a truck of that size going 40 mph on that road doesn’t have the capability to react.”

“It seems like a fatality is bound to happen … It seems like pure luck no one was injured or killed in the rollover,” Subbaiah said.

Earlier this year, an Issaquah School District bus was nearly rear-ended by a semi truck on May Valley Road, not far from the spot where the rollover occurred. In response to the threat posed by the trucks, the district moved the bus stop.

Subbaiah is so afraid of her own road that she doesn’t know if she wants to let her oldest child stand outside and wait for the school bus when he starts school in the autumn, especially during the months when it is still dark outside at the time children are collected in the morning.

Located in a rural paradise in the farmland south of Issaquah with mountain views, May Valley Road has always been a place where children play outdoors in their yards, and outdoor enthusiasts bike and even ride horses down the road. Now, however, people are afraid to venture outside.

In the past, “you could walk, ride your bike and not have to worry about being run over constantly,” Thompson said. “These trucks are out of control.”

“It’s a VERY VERY DANGEROUS road to be on, especially, with the big trucks that fill almost the whole lane leaving no room for any errors,” said resident Patricia Langton in an email.

Drivers, too, are afraid. Subbaiah noted that when navigating the twists and turns of May Valley Road, she often notices trucks crossing the center line up ahead of her.

“They’re not staying in their lane, you don’t really know if they’re gonna keep coming over into oncoming traffic,” she said.

“Numerous times we have almost been hit by the speeding trucks when leaving High Valley, pulling onto May Valley Road,” High Valley resident Cathy Brandt added in an email.

And as resident Nadine Drisseq pointed out in an email, the road is also home to a variety of animal species, whose lives are now also in jeopardy.

“There are wildlife crossing corridors on May Valley – note the Elk Crossing signs,” Drisseq said. “The creek that runs through the bottom of the valley is a resource for many animals that live in the area who need to cross the highway to go from one resource (food and shelter on the mountain) to another (water and valley habitat resources). “

Subbaiah said that she “definitely saw an immediate increase” in semi truck traffic since the ordinance went into effect last fall. On occasion, she has stood outdoors and counted the number of semi trucks coming through, and each time, she said, she has counted about one truck per minute — a huge difference from the amount of trucks the road used to get.

Residents have also noticed a large increase in dust and noise since the trucks were rerouted.

“Trucks roar by all day long and the noise has become unbearable,” said resident Lynn Cruz, who lives near the intersection of May Valley Road and the Issaquah-Hobart Road.

An entire group of Sunset Valley Farms residents spoke in front of the council last autumn, bringing a petition signed by about 200 residents. However, many of the residents reported feeling as though they don’t matter to the city government because, although their addresses say Issaquah, they do not live in city limits and do not vote for city officials.

“I feel like [the council] very politely said, ‘That’s a sad story, but we don’t care. We were elected to make the hard choices and put Issaquah residents first,’” Subbaiah said.

“We’re still residents of Issaquah,” Thompson said. “Because we don’t live in town, we don’t matter? You’re just going to stick us with this?”

Subbaiah agrees that Olde Town is not an appropriate place for trucks, but noted that “now [Issaquah] has become a major suburb of Seattle” and it is time to take infrastructure steps to accommodate the ever-increasing truck traffic of a growing area, such as putting in a bypass between I-90 and the Issaquah-Hobart Road or adding additional lanes to regional thoroughfares, such as the Issaquah-Hobart Road.

“May Valley Road became the bypass they didn’t want to build,” Subbaiah observed.

While she realizes that the council isn’t technically required to solve the problems of areas outside of city limits, she hopes that council members will see that a decision they made has put May Valley residents in a tough situation.

“They’re not taking accountability for their actions that have a direct, negative impact on us,” she said.