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| Views of Highway 95 from north and south ends of Friday's slide, courtesy TraffiCorps |
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| View from the top of the slide looking down onto Highway 95, courtesy Cheryl Stockdale. |
Once again, both lanes of Highway 95 were covered in mud several feet deep just south of Mountain Meadows Road near Naples, completely shutting down the highway that has only had a single lane open since the initial slide almost three weeks ago.
Fortunately no one, road personnel or passing motorists, were caught in the slide, and while traffic backed up more than a mile and a half rather quickly, county road and bridge personnel and sheriff's deputies were able to soon get commercial vehicles diverted around the slide via Highway 2 at Three Mile Junction and Highway 200 in Bonner County, and get the backed up traffic moving once again on Deep Creek Loop at Naples to Lookout View Road just south of where Deep Creek Loop was closed due to flood and sloughing damage March 22.
It was by no means an ideal route, just the only route passable by the heavy rigs and regular traffic that were caught up when the slide hit. There were reports of rigs and cars getting stuck; several drivers reported how white-knuckle the twisting, narrow Lookout View Road was to traverse, espicially in those places where the side f the road drops straight down, but, in spite of a couple reports of road rage as some motorists lost patience, no accidents were reported and no one was hurt.
Almost before the slide stopped moving, local heavy-equipment contractors, the same ones called in after the first slide, were called up and moving. The phone rang here, a worker at the sign shop next door to Wink Inc. on Highway 2.
"What's going on?" he asked. "The folks over at Wink took off like it was pretty important, so I figured something must have come apart again."
Crews from Fitch Construction and Stippich Crushing and Hauling were just as quick to respond, and amazingly, by about 8 p.m., ITD officials were able to release a two or three hour estimate on getting the southbound lane open again to alternating traffic, and then work crews beat that time, getting the lane reopened at 9:32 p.m., just a bit over seven hours after the hill let go.
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