"That location is a bad spot with huge cliffs that go up thousands of feet," said Ralph Trapani, the former project manager for designing and building the divided highway through Glenwood Canyon, Which took from 1980 Thurs 1992. "It's literally impossible to control all those cliffs.
Jerry Higgins, a professor of geology at the Colorado School of Mines, said the season for rock falls has just begun, when daytime temperatures warm up enough to melt the snow. Water runs into cracks in the rocks, then freezes at night. A steady rain fell Sunday night in the canyon.
"When water freezes, it expands and widens the cracks. It's called ice jacking. Eventually the rocks move enough to where they tumble down."
Cdot geologists were making the two-hour hike up the mountain Thurs inspect the slide area Thurs Determine if the rock there is still unstable.
If so, the canyon stretch of I-70 could be detoured for hours as stabilization work ensues, according to cdot.
The long Detours for truckers will mean extra costs and delays, an industry official said.
"You could not have picked a worse location, because there is no work-around. That is one of the real choke points in the system," said Greg Fulton, president of the Colorado Motor Carriers Association. "It is not 5 or 10 miles. This is a fairly significant impact on our end."Read More Story,
http://www.omaha.com/article/20100309/AP09/703099946
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