The video shows the roadway suddenly ending with a jagged chunk suspended over massive hole.
The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office has released a video showing a collapsed portion of Highway 1 along the steep coast of California after heavy rains.
The clip begins with a driver’s view of the highway as the vehicle winds along the coast near Big Sur. Suddenly, both lanes of the road disappear, leaving a 150-foot gap over a muddy hole sloping toward the Pacific Ocean.
A hillside “debris flow” above the roadway, which began on Thursday, “overwhelmed drainage infrastructure, flowed across the highway and eroded the road, resulting in the complete loss of a segment of Highway 1,” said a statement from the California Department of Transportation. It occurred about 45 miles south of Carmel along the state’s central coast.
The landslide occurred about one mile south of a huge burn area left by last summer’s Dolan Fire. Land denuded by wildfire is far more prone to landslides in heavy rains. Up to 10 inches of rain fell in parts of the area in just a few days. Sixteen inches of rain pelted a peak in the nearby Santa Lucia Mountains from Tuesday to Friday.
Luckily, no one was injured in the road collapse as the highway had been closed because of fears of a mudslide.
CalTrans Emergency Manager Zeke Dellamas surveys a portion of Highway 1 at Rat Creek that got washed into the Pacific Ocean south of Big Sur, following a rainstorm, Friday, Jan. 29, 2021. @mcweekly pic.twitter.com/1tQsAYPqdp
— Joel Angel Juárez (@jajuarezphoto) January 30, 2021