CA Highway 1 Partially Collapses

[DriverDave]

Supposedly a landslide caused part of the iconic route to break off down the mountain side. Hundreds of trapped drivers had to be rescued. Do you think this road was safe to begin with when it was built the way it was?

[Rothman]

Supposedly a landslide caused part of the iconic route to break off down the mountain side. Hundreds of trapped drivers had to be rescued. Do you think this road was safe to begin with when it was built the way it was?

Yes.

[cahwyguy]

Supposedly a landslide caused part of the iconic route to break off down the mountain side. Hundreds of trapped drivers had to be rescued. Do you think this road was safe to begin with when it was built the way it was?

If I didn't know better, I'd think this was the Quora Prompt Generator.

Let's start with the "Hundreds of trapped drivers had to be rescued". Not as dramatic as is sounds: They didn't go down the cliff. Rather, they were tourists who were in Big Sur, and after the collapse, couldn't get out of the area to the N or S via Route 1, or across the mountains. In that sense, they were trapped.

Was the road safe to begin with? Well, it hadn't collapsed in the almost 100 years since it was built. In those mountains, slipouts happen. Mountains slide. They engineer the best they can, but this happens with that type of rock. The alternative is no road at all in the area, so there's some risk. The road could be closed during the winter; that's how it was to sometime in the 1960s if not later.

All travel has risks.

[Quillz]

Well there is no source provided, but I'm also going on a limb and saying this has probably happened before. I mentioned in another thread that one time I was "trapped" between Arcata and Crescent City due to a sudden rockslide on US-101. Couldn't go north to Crescent City, CA-299 was closed east of Arcata, so I had no choice but to spend the night there when I was trying to get into Oregon.

If they "needed to be rescued," that suggests a side road that might have been closed was reopened. There are also ongoing repairs happening in that area, so a small "speed bump" was probably likely to begin with.

[Max Rockatansky]

I'm assuming this is referring to the slip out by the Rocky Creek Bridge.  If so, this was a garden variety slide for the area and definitely not Mud Creek.

[cahwyguy]

I'm assuming this is referring to the slip out by the Rocky Creek Bridge.  If so, this was a garden variety slide for the area and definitely not Mud Creek.

And to be precise, the slide by Rocky Creek was a slipout -- part of the road slide down the mountain. Mud Creek and that area is a big mud slide onto the highway, where the mountain above collapsed down onto the road, and the mud is still moving.

[cl94]

The slipout near Rocky Creek is relatively minor. I have seen pictures and, at this time, one lane is passable. They don't want it open without escorts and monitoring until they get a fix in place (for obvious reasons), but this is a pretty tame slide by California standards. Something will probably be in place by mid-late April to make it safe for unsupervised traffic if the weather holds up and more doesn't slide away.

Far cry from Paul's Slide and other areas of recent movement to the south, where rocks/mud were generally falling onto the road. No word on how any of the recent weather impacted that remediation work.