Thread: Major slide closes I-70 in western Colorado

Major slide closes I-70 in western Colorado

updated 6:06 a.m. PT, Mon., March. 8, 2010

GLENWOOD SPRINGS, Colo. - A 17-mile stretch of Interstate 70 has been closed in western Colorado after a rock slide punched gaping holes in a bridge and left huge boulders on the highway.

The slide struck at about midnight Sunday near the Hanging Lake Tunnel in Glenwood Canyon, a deep and narrow chasm about 110 miles west of Denver, the Colorado Department of Transportation said.

No injuries or damage to vehicles were reported.

All lanes are closed from Glenwood Springs east to the town of Dotsero. Up to 25,000 vehicles a day travel that section, CDOT spokeswoman Stacy Stegman said.

Highway crews working with flashlights said the slide left two large holes in a westbound bridge, one of them about 10 feet by 20 feet. All lanes were blocked by boulders, some the size of a tractor-trailer rig.

Some of the boulders are so big they will have to be blown apart with explosives before they can be hauled away, Stegman said.

Crews planned to do a more thorough assessment in daylight.

A 1995 rock slide on I-70 in Glenwood Canyon killed three people.

A slide on Thanksgiving day in 2004 closed the highway and required nearly $700,000 worth of repairs. No one was hurt because the highway had previously been closed for an unrelated crash.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35762334/ns/us_news/

The results of the greenies. Environmentalism strikes again. Only an idiot did not see this coming. The canyon as beautiful as it is, has its walls rising ever so high vertically with no place for the occasional shedding of rock to go but downward. Guess what sits at the bottom snaking its way next to the canyon walls?

When the road was expanded and construction took place, the only place work was aloud was along the path of the road, and only so many feet to either side of the projected path. Trees, bushes, clumps of native vegetation, boulders, rat holes all were protected to the tune of massive fines if any where hurt or damaged. What should have been removed at that time was off limits. Rocket science was not needed to see the rocks and their descending path that they surely would take as they left their perch due to the natural forces of weather, winter freezes, spring thaws, and natural erosion played its normal role.