Landslide Closes SR 14 in Utah

[Updated Thursday May 29, 2009 – 1:00 PM PDT] Added a photo of the AIS Kaiser S2 excavator (spider excavator), and added photos of the Devil’s Slide debris dump where they have put the landslide material removed and the material from the tunnel excavation. [/Update]

Grant Wilcox, Geology Branch Chief with CALTRANS Office of Geotechnical Design West gave a presentation on the Devil’s Slide repair along PCH Highway 1 at the Southwest Geotechnical Engineer’s Conference on May 12 in Phoenix. I’ve posted about the project here before. When I saw Mr. Wilcox, I knew he looked familiar but I couldn’t figure out why. At the beginning of his presentation he made light of his being on You-Tube…then it clicked! He gave a nice overview of the history of the failures, the geology, and the tunnel project. What follows are a few quick tidbits from his talk based on my notes. (Photo via Caltrans site).

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Residents of a neighborhood on the north side of Salt Lake City, Utah received some bad news recently from a state geologist. The slow moving landslide that has been moving on the order of several inches per year has begun moving at a faster rate. They predict movement on the order of feet per year. Several houses have already been condemned and torn down with more likely. Click through for some news footage showing the problem area and some of the damage to house foundations, sidewalks, pipes and other reactions from unfortunate residents. (Photo by KSL, NBC Salt Lake City affiliate)

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A couple of weeks ago the Landslides Under a Microscope blog had two nice posts about Landslide Mitigation examples in Japan. The author references the book “Landslides in Japan” (1996), but I’m not sure if […]