I wonder why they didn’t shore up the “Old Man in the Mountain” with steel reinforcement or something. It’s sort of like Mt. Rushmore suddenly one day just collapsing. (We had a stone bridge in our hometown that just one day FELL into a pile of rubble in the river; destroyed one of the biggest tourist attractions in the town. They were doing road construction on the road beside it and didn’t to my knowledge shore up the bridge. It had escaped Sherman only to be leveled by neglect.)
The Old Man was in the process of being shored up with steel beams drilled into the side of the cliff. The whole ledge just collapsed before they were able to finish it. The destruction was pretty complete.
About that road construction, were they blasting? Guy I know used to live on a private lake and the home owners on the lake owned and maintained a small dam that controlled the water level. There was some road work going on on a nearby public road. The home owners (who were also dam owners) were leary about the contractor, so they instrumented the dam with accelerometers. They were able to show that the contractor was using several times the allowable charge and took him to court. The contractor was obliged to post a $1,000,000 insurance bond against any future failure of the dam.