Highway 1 to reopen in summer after $11.5M repair

Caltrans announces project to rebuild scenic roadway wrecked in heavy winter

A massive slide that sent a section of Highway 1 on the southern Big Sur coast into the ocean last month will be repaired and reopened “early this summer,” Caltrans

announced Feb. 25.

Road crews will fill in a large canyon across the roadway with tens of thousands of cubic yards of dirt in a V-shape and construct a new road on top of the fill. The project will cost $11.5 million, state highway officials said. The emergency construction project will begin next week.

“Highway 1 is an iconic roadway that connects travelers with small businesses on the central coast, and we’re focused on restoring travel on this section by early summer,” said Caltrans Director Toks Omishakin in a statement.

The scenic, two-lane roadway failed about 16 miles south of Pfeiffer Big Sur

State Park during a drenching atmospheric river storm that hit the Bay Area, Santa Cruz Mountains and Big Sur on Jan. 28. The Big Sur area, visited every year by millions of tourists, received the most rain — up to 15 inches in some remote areas of the Santa Lucia mountains — over two days. The rain caused a large section of steep hillsides that burned in the Dolan fire last August, and adjacent to the road at Rat Creek, to collapse, carving a huge gash in the roadway just north of the community of Lucia.

Summer officially begins June 20. But work on the repair project will depend, in part, on how much it rains in the next month or two.

Highway engineers had studied several options, including a bridge, to repair the breathtaking gap in the roadway, photos of which drew worldwide attention. Crews plan now to replace the main drainage system at Rat Creek with an oversized main culvert, a secondary culvert and smaller overflow culverts. They say that will increase the capacity of the drainage system, which became plugged in the storm with boulders, mud and downed trees, and help it withstand future storms.