4/14/2010
Massive rock slide covers part of Idaho 55 - rock removal following Sunday's slide near McCall scheduled for next week
BOISE - Crews will be removing rock
from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. near McCall on Idaho 55 next Tuesday
through Thursday (April 20-22) to clean up an area affected by a rock slide
on Sunday (April 11).
The northbound lane, closest to the mountainside, was covered by the slide. Spelman was soon joined by New Meadows Foreman Robin Freeman and a half dozen other ITD maintenance men attempting to clear the southbound lane and maintain one-way traffic. They continued to move boulders, as rocks fell down the hill and landed around them.
Freeman decided to close the highway at 10:40 a.m., before the slide further compromised the safety of the ITD crew or the public. Several larger rocks and a tree remained on the hillside, but they were unstable and had to be lowered to the road via cable - they posed too big a safety risk to leave unattended.
"The crew used a loader and a grader to push the big rocks to a wide spot in the road to be broken up and hauled away later," explained Freeman. "The road surface suffered damage; the worst of which was a crater 4-5 feet wide in the northbound lane."
Maintenance crews from New Meadows, Council and Boise cleaned up the debris, removing seven or eight truckloads of rock from the area. Crews patched the roadway surface in order to reopen the road by 2:30 p.m., less than four hours after it was closed.
ITD plans to start work on Tuesday
morning and finish on Thursday. The work
also involves minor blasting to bring down rocks that pose a safety concern,
and motorists should expect lengthy delays during the work - up to 30 minutes.
Crews will perform some rock scaling
and some light blasting to remove hazardous rocks, with ITD personnel
performing traffic control and loading and hauling the rocks to a storage site.