On Monday, September 29, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) completed the cleanup of the massive rockslide at McKenzie Junction that was triggered in January on Highway 96 in the Wet Mountains.
After the initial cleanup, which required hundreds of semitruck loads to complete, CDOT was unable to finish the job and left concrete barriers on the north side of the highway to catch any remaining rockfall. This created a tight and unexpected traffic obstacle at the junction, posing a danger to motorists.
With the help of the contractor of Langston Trucking, another 1,500 tons of rock were cleared from the side of the highway and taken to the Portland Cement Plant in Florence to be used as aggregate. Most of the work was completed on Monday, with crews cleaning up and patching the highway and remarking lines on Tuesday.
As previously reported in the Tribune, the rockslide at McKenzie Junction was unique due to an ancient fault line that fractured the solid granite rock into unstable rubble. The current work does not seem to have removed enough of the slope to prevent another rockslide in the future. This is likely due to the high cost of removing enough of the rock face to avoid further slides. The Tribune has not been able to find a precise cost of the cleanup operation, but an estimate of the number of truckloads hauled out puts the figure well over a million dollars.
To understand why the cleanup took so long, read our previously published article on the subject, âThe billion-year-old fault that caused the Hardscrabble rockslide and why fixing the problem for good wonât be easy.â
â Jordan Hedberg
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