Pacific Northwest 16, August 1, 2021

PACIFIC NORTHWEST EDITION

A Supplement to:

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August 1 2021 Vol. V • No. 16

“The Nation’s Best Read Construction Newspaper… Founded in 1957.” Your Pacific Northwest Connection – Patrick Kiel – 1-877-7CEGLTD – pkiel@cegltd.com

By Lori Tobias CEG CORRESPONDENT

After more than five months, a state highway in rural western Washington has reopened to traffic, but it is anyone’s guess how long the route will remain passable. State Route 112 has a long history of landslides, but a series of slides last December dropped the road in six different locations. In one spot, the road fell nearly 13 ft. Christina Werner, spokeswoman of the Washington State Department of Transpiration (WSDOT), described the storms that hit around winter solstice an “astronomical amount of heavy rains and snow and flooding.” In one area the slide covers a quarter-mile stretch.

“Typically on that stretch, there are several areas prone to sliding,” said Project Engineer Dan McKernan. “They are usually not really major and our maintenance department has loaders and dump trucks to take care of the minor sloughing of the slope. We take care of it through the maintenance fund. But this time we had storms come in and the ground got more saturated than typical. That’s why we put it out to the contractor, Scarsella Brothers.” Scarsella crews mobilized company-owned equipment, including Cat D5s, a Cat 225 excavator, a Cat 140 grader and dump trucks. “Rather than building back up to where it used to be, we lowered the profile,” said McKernan. “We didn’t want to put more weight on the slide area, so we changed the profile.

Something else we are doing, is we’re not putting asphalt back down. Instead, they put down ground up rock for the driving surface. In minor movements that will allow our maintenance forces to go in and dress it up and use gravel to smooth it out. That’s something we did up there rather than pave the driving surface.” The area is sparsely populated but does have some homes and private land camping areas, as well as logging road access. During the closure, traffic was detoured along another highway. “When the last big slide occurred, that required the contractor to go in and rebuild it,” McKernan said. “Maintenance is in there every year cleaning up small debris see LANDSLIDE page 6