Posted on 05/26/2019 6:48:34 PM PDT by MtnClimber
DOLORES, Colo. (KKTV) - Boulders weighing a combined 10 million pounds destroyed a stretch of highway in southwestern Colorado and have left road crews with a daunting cleanup job.
"It’s truly mind-boggling that something that big came down," said Mike McVaugh, CDOT Regional Transportation director for southwest Colorado. McVaugh spoke with 11 News sister station CBS Denver about the job ahead.
The massive boulders were part of a rockslide Friday afternoon that rendered part of Highway 145 impassable. The slide left behind an 8-foot-deep trench where pavement once was.
According to CDOT, the trench was caused by the biggest boulder to fall, which weighs a whopping 8.5 million pounds and is roughly the size of a house. A second boulder landed on the highway that weighs 2.3 [million] pounds. Cleanup crews were dispatched immediately after the slide.
"They sent a plow truck out, they sent a supervisor out. They showed up on site and they were like, ‘That’s not going to work. We’ve got some really big rocks here,’” McVaugh said. “[The boulders] came off a cliff band about 850 feet above the highway."
(Excerpt) Read more at kktv.com ...
...with a herring.
Colorado Ping ( Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from the list.)
I live on a mountain ridge just west of the Colorado Front Range. The highway goes up a canyon until it goes over the mountain ridge. At the bottom of the canyon the walls are very steep and vary between 1,000 and 2,000 high. Many huge boulders by the creek that must have fallen like that.
If I had been filming that, I would have probably crapped my pants! You probably think you are far enough away...then it gets closer...and closer, and suddenly, you don’t feel so safe.
Just wow.
Interesting, I was in Dolores on Thursday.
My annual motorcycle ride is usually through there, and we camp on a tributary of the West Dolores. We drive past that slope all the time looking at the trails of wreckage to the vegetation these boulders leave and seeing lots of boulders still up there.
The Million Dollar Highway; Ouray to Silverton is also part of the loop we ride. Both of the closed roads would have interfered with our plans.
We didn’t go this year do to business complications, and it turns out we would have been riding back here to Flagstaff on Monday in a late season rain/snow storm.
Thank You
A big boulder the size of a car tried to take us out, between Silverton and Ouray back around 1987. Thankfully I had stopped at a slide area to read of new deaths, for a moment. That moment probably saved us.
But you got to get within 20 ft to read the sign.
I was in Dolores and Rico about two weeks ago. As you probably know, they got heavier than normal snow this winter.
That’s a highway? Looks like little more than a wagon trail.
Your going to need a big rock drill and the proper application of explosives to fix that.
Seems like strategic drilling and placement of C4 charges is called for, to make the big rocks into little ones that can be moved.
I was expecting a steep cliff next to the highway. Based on the slope of the valley in the photo, it looks like that boulder may have come from a fair distance!
Gneiss photo!
I was overseas on a project and they had 6 to 8 guys on top of a boulder right by the road and some buildings. They were using drill bits and hammers. Two guys per team. One guy holds the bit, the other guy hits it. Rotate the bit, hit it.
Once they get it down there they put clay in the hole and then wet it. The clay expands, and a bit of the boulder breaks off.
I was there for three months. Most of the boulder was still there as well. I’m pretty sure that it was the country’s form of welfare. The mine had to hire a large amount of locals in order to have the mine there. See the same guy sweeping a 100’x 100’ slab of concrete all day, etc.
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