Weekend CUP for April 20, 2010

Earlier this month, there was a massive slope failure on the "Sea to Sky" highway in British Columbia. It is interesting to note that this same area had a large rockslide in 1965, and a photo of this failure is featured on the cover of the classic text, Rock Slope Engineering by Hoek and Bray. The media played up the aspect that this highway is one of the only ways to access the site of the 2010 Winter Olympic games hosted by Vancouver.

The composite image above shows the book cover and the recent rockslide event (Photo credit: Erik Eberhardt of the University of British Columbia by way of Dave’s Landslide Blog). Dave has done a fabulous job collecting photos, facts and links from around the web. In a follow up post, he added some additional photos and discussion. I recently came across an article that described how the highway originally was slated to have a tunnel bypassing the slide, but that the price tag of $200 million (CAN?) for a 1-km stretch killed the project.

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[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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The Arizona DOT and their contractor have begun blasting and earthwork to realign a portion of US 89 in northern Arizona near Page that was cut off by a large landslide in February of 2013. […]