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Dive brief:
- The California Department of Transportation has awarded a $1 million emergency contract to Sacramento-based Teichert for initial safety and stabilization work on a washout that closed a stretch of the iconic Highway 1 near from Big Sur last weekend. A Caltrans spokesman said the initial funding amount is likely to increase to account for the first phase of site stabilization.
- After being pummeled by up to 2 inches of rain per hour on Friday, a portion of the southbound lane at the height of the Pacific Ocean gave way on Saturday, leaving a piece the size of a vehicle missing from the edge outside the road. Caltrans closed the route, and at least 1,600 people were temporarily stranded in the area while engineers assessed the situation.
- “We’re looking at in-situ stabilization at this point,” Caltrans spokesman Kevin Drabinski said of monitoring and assessing what the agency called Rocky Creek, or an area where the ground under a roadway. it falls from below, similar to a sinkhole. “Our goal is to shore up the edge of that road and keep it from going in the wrong direction.”
Diving knowledge:
So far, crews have installed cones and established measures to monitor roadway safety, with plans to erect 500 feet of more permanent concrete barriers, called K-rails, on the centerline. Monitoring shows the roadway is stable, Caltrans said, and travel is still possible in the inside lane.
On Sunday, Caltrans began running convoys of vehicles twice a day on the inside lane, closer to the hillside, to allow commuters to travel through the area near the Rocky Creek Bridge about 17 miles to the south of Monterey. But those trains have been canceled for Thursday and Friday, with more rain expected in the area. Convoys will resume on Saturday, if the road is still deemed safe.
“We are monitoring the situation very closely,” Drabinski said. “We’ll be there during the rains to keep an eye on any changes in repair site conditions because when you have a slip, rain is not what you ask for to improve it.”
Geotechnical specialists were deployed to the area Wednesday to continue their assessments, which will inform any permanent repair plans, Drabinski said. The future scope of work would likely extend beyond the affected portion of the roadway to use more stable and safe ground north and south of the slide.
“This is in a place where the runoff is one way, the mountainside above it is another way, and the runoff to the ocean is something else,” Drabinski said. He said the agency would draw on past experiences with similar outages to develop a solution for that specific site and that the permanent work would likely be covered under a separate contract.
Past slides
It’s not the only stretch of the famous route, which is known as the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California and hugs the rugged coast from California to Oregon, to experience slides and closures, some of which have lasted more than a year to clean up. .
For example, in addition to work at Dolan Point Slide south of the current slide, Caltrans is also working on Paul’s Slide, which has closed a section of the freeway south of Lucia since it occurred in December 2022. Work is expected to be completed this spring. According to the San Luis Obispo Tribune, a total of seven slides have closed more than 40 miles of the road in the area.
As for the derailment that occurred Saturday, Caltrans does not yet have an estimate on the cost or duration of a more permanent repair.
After storms battered the California coast in December 2022 and January 2023, the state issued more than $100 million in emergency repairs to Granite Construction, based in Watsonville, Calif., along with other contractors.
