A “significant” rock fall that sent a boulder the size of a building tumbling onto the highway continues to block traffic in Colorado.
The southwest city of Ouray issued a travel alert Friday, warning drivers that Highway 145 would be closed “indefinitely” after a massive slide sent boulders into the road.
“The slide consisting of dirt, rock and two huge boulders which have destroyed the full width of the highway pavement, leaving a trench approximately eight feet deep across both lanes,” the city wrote on social media. “The road is impassable at this time.”
The city noted it would have to call in a geotechnical team, as well as special equipment and supplies, to blast the boulder into smaller pieces in order to move it off the road.
According to the Colorado Department of Transportation, the boulder sitting on the highway weighs an estimated 2.3 million lbs., while the one that blew out an eight-foot trench is 8.5 million lbs.
Photos of the massive rocks shared to Facebook show how the boulder dwarfs a worker standing in front of it, and reveals the impact of the fall destroyed the highway surrounding it, breaking much of the pavement into pieces.
The Colorado Department of Transportation offered a follow-up to the situation Saturday, writing that an investigation by a geotechnical crew found that a team would need to be airlifted to clear any loose rock from the ridgeline in order to prevent similar falls.
The department said that once its mitigation and scaling work is complete, a crew could begin drilling and blasting the boulders, though a timeline was unclear.
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