Big Sur Hwy.1 Fix

[John]

Here are some pix of the Highway 1 landslide repair along the Big Sur Coast to complement the ones on Edhat. Those were taken 8/6 on a flight to San Francisco, and these are from the return flight 8/7.

This one gives an impression of the massive size and the steep slope of loose debris. They seem to have already removed a mountain of it to make the flat area with a line of shipping containers apparently connected to catch any falling boulders. That level area could be to protect the highway once repaired, and maybe allow it to re-open while they still keep working above it. When these pix were taken, most of the work was near the beach and there's probably more debris to remove up at the roadway area to bypass the current zigzag that connects down to the beach.


Here's a closer look at the shipping containers and beach work.


Here's another wide shot from the Southern side for comparison. Would be interesting to compare with gEarth 3D from these angles to get a sense of where the road used to be, and if you do that please post a followup to this thread.

[John]

There are details about the Hwy.1 closures on Caltrans, but they don't seem to have a map. With the "traffic" option turned on, there's some indication on this gMaps link. We noticed during the flight what appeared to be road work at many places along the route, so we figured they were taking advantage of the major closure to do other work. The above Caltrans link seems to list those. Using that list I found the landslide (at a place prophetically named Mud Creek) here on gMaps currently showing it before the slide, and it's striking. Here's a screencap from that gMaps "before" satellite 3D view for comparison with my last pic of the three above.

[DS]

I mashed up a quick gif showing before/after, attached. Edit: whoops, google won't show the animation when viewed, here is an imgur link instead: http://i.imgur.com/3G4Y34V.gifv

[SB Citizen]

That is *exceptionally cool* DS! Thanks for stretching the gMaps
screencap to approximately match the aerial pic. Not easy to do given
that my lens geometry doesn't match the "lens" of gMaps 3D.

I've made this 2-second .mov file of it that's interesting to watch in
Loop mode. Like your animated gif it doesn't play in View mode here on
the website. When I use the Download link here on the website or view
the email attachment it plays fine, and with Loop (View/Loop in
Quicktime) turned on it's fascinating to see what parts of the slope let
go, and ponder what's still holding adjacent parts in place.

Must be quite an exercise for soil engineers to determine what will
constitute a finished project with long-term stability. Flying the rest
of that coast we saw so many more areas where the untrained eye can
imagine big slides.

Thanks again for your intriguing contribution!

ps-After some failed attempts to reply on the website via Firefox, I'm
sending this via email reply that will hopefully work. :/