Slow mo to get to the demo
May 9—Fans heading to the Smash Bash Demolition Derby held at a new venue in North Lewiston created bumper-to-bumper traffic Saturday evening, backing up cars on 21st Street as far south as 16th Avenue.
The line of cars stretched from Albright Grade, where the site of the derby, EC Enterprises Motorsports Park, is located, across Memorial Bridge to the intersection of Main and 21st Street and beyond. At 6 p.m., cars heading north on 21st Street were moving at a crawl.
"We opened the gates at like 4:17, and we had four lanes open getting them in, so it was efficient getting in and still, Gary Peters was flying his warbird around," Eric Christiansen, owner of the facility, said early today. "He did a flyover for us after the national anthem, and he was reporting that the traffic was backed up down River Road. People coming from Moscow or Juliaetta or whatnot."
August Frank, the Lewiston Tribune photographer assigned to shoot the derby reported that it took him nearly three hours to get from downtown to the motorsports park.
The Lewiston Police Department sent out flaggers to try to help direct traffic to the event, which had been scheduled to begin at 6 p.m.
The bottleneck came at city's rose garden in North Lewiston, where traffic had to turn left to access Albright Grade.
"I've never ever seen that kind of traffic at any event in the valley," Christiansen said. "It was pretty amazing."
Once things got underway, crowds filled the bleachers and sat in lawn chairs or on the ground in the hillsides around the arena to watch the derby. It ended just before 10 p.m.
Christiansen told the Tribune in a story Friday that he estimated the capacity at the venue for this first event to be 3,500. The venue and its 60,000-square-foot arena opened this year. It's about double the size of the 36,000-square-foot Lewiston Roundup Grounds arena.
"The event went really good," Christiansen said. "We didn't have any injuries and had some hard hits. For a first event, I was very pleased."
