3-28-2007

By now, I'm sure you know about the landslide on the Sunset Highway (slide happened at 9 AM, blocked all westbound traffic until about 5:30PM, no one was hurt, one lane will stay closed for a week while crews investigate the soil). I spent the day camped out on the roadside sending updates back to the station as events progressed . . .

** Creepiest moment of the day: Granted, it's not everyday you spend your time wandering around on a major freeway but NOTHING will compare with watching crew members REPEL down the seventy-foot cliff to saw down trees perched over the road about thirty-feet up. Imagine a rock-climbing excursion with a POWER SAW attached to your belt. Gives me the willies just thinking about it.

** Coolest moment of the day: I don't know if you've ever seen a 40-foot fir tree sawed down . . . but I'm willing to bet very few people have seen a forty-foot tree plummet off a 70-foot cliff onto a free way. It's like something out of a movie. It sounded like one big SNAP and looked like someone threw a big box of match sticks all over the freeway.

** It all comes down to a street sweeper. For HOURS the roadway was littered with heavy machinery. Excavators, dump trucks, bull dozers. All loading up tree trunks and piles of dirt. But when all that was cleared away, a simple street sweeper was brought in to dust up the last bits of debris. Kind of looked like the city was polishing things up for motorists.

** Random. Apparently some local folks wanted an up-close look at the work. Throughout the day there was a sporadic stream of bicyclists and pedestrians wandering down the freeway (I assume from the zoo on ramp) to check on things. It was particularly funny watching ODOT crews do a double take when they realized the effort had turned into a tourist attraction.

** The Red Cross showed up for most of the afternoon. They have this cool program where volunteers come out to disaster scenes, fires things like that . . . and they provide drinks and snacks for the workers. It's actually a really cool idea when you think about it. I mean, how many of those ODOT crew members thought they would spend their entire day on the freeway? And it was a real kick watching these construction workers smile as they unwrapped a snack-size package of Oreos or a granola bar. Little things like that can make a big difference (especially when you CONTRAST that with the motorists who thought it was helpful to honk their horns and shout obscenities as they passed by on the Sunset east bound).