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Red Mountain work to resume

Road to be closed several hours during day for next four weeks
In January, Colorado Department of Transportation contractors were installing these 12-foot by 72-foot wire-mesh panels to stop rock from falling onto U.S. Highway 550 south of Ouray.

Red Mountain Pass will be closed for several hours each day for the next four weeks as work resumes Monday on stabilizing a mountainside that rained rocks along U.S. Highway 550 during the winter.

Work is expected to be done before Memorial Day on the north side of Red Mountain Pass between Ironton Park (mile marker 87) and just south of Ouray (mile marker 92), Nancy Shanks, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Transportation, said Thursday.

That stretch of road will be fully closed from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 1:30 to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday. CDOT flaggers will be in Silverton to help drivers determine if they have time to get through during the 12:30-1:30 p.m. lunch-break window, Shanks said.

When open, traffic through that section will be by alternating a single lane controlled by a signal, as it has been around the clock since Feb. 10.

A large rockslide Jan. 12 led to a nearly monthlong closure of the road over the pass. Now that spring is here, rocks are loosening with the freeze-thaw cycle and are hitting a retaining fence that guards the open lane. Some rocks are also hitting the road, Shanks said.

“We need to mitigate that right away,” Shanks said. CDOT has enlisted “emergency contracting” to do the work.

For a short-term fix in January, two helicopters helped lay 40,000 square feet of steel netting to contain rock in the slide area. Each panel, which resembles chain-link fencing, measures 72 feet by 12 feet and weighs 600 pounds. The nets were anchored by workers attached to ropes on the mountainside.

In the upcoming work phase, a CDOT contractor will conduct the follow-up rock-scaling work, which will involve climbing to the rockfall site above Highway 550, removing and repairing the existing rock fence and installing rockfall-monitoring equipment. The work is estimated to cost $928,000.

Traffic will return to a single lane controlled by a signal after the work is complete, Shanks said.

This summer, long-term mitigation will include the installation of additional mesh on the slope, as well as rockfall fences and rockfall attenuators – a kind of barrier that slows down the descent of a falling rock. CDOT said the final design will depend on the success of this rockfall scaling work and the information gathered during the scaling.

“Once we get all this loose rock down, we’ll have a better idea,” Shanks said.

Similar traffic closures during the long-term work are likely, but have not been determined, she said.

The Colorado Transportation Commission provided $173,588 in contingency funding for the design, while construction estimates for the summer mitigation project are $2.3 million, a CDOT news release said.

CDOT estimates an average of 2,200 cars travel daily over 11,200-foot Red Mountain Pass.

For more information, visit www.coloradodot.info/travel/scheduled-lane-closures.html, www.cotrip.org or call 511.



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