NEWPORT – Expect long delays on U.S. Highway 101 in the Beverly Beach area north of Newport on Tuesday and Wednesday, Jan. 7-8 as the highway is reduced to a single lane to make more repairs.
The Oregon Department of Transportation announced Monday afternoon that motorists driving between Newport and Depoe Bay should expect long delays as flaggers limit traffic to one lane from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
An ODOT spokeswoman said that last weekend crews noticed a few areas of sunken pavement between mileposts 133 and 136 south of Beverly Beach State Park.
“We are hoping to work quickly to get this repaired while the weather forecast is more favorable,” said ODOT’s Mindy McCartt.
The area to be repaired is farther south than the extensive but short-term work done last March. More than 11,000 vehicles travel that stretch of the highway daily.
The Moolack area cracks have been opening up at a rapid pace with 5 inches of rain in the first 5 days of the year. Getting a little bumpy in my subcompact. Not looking forward to the impaired access to town, but glad ODOT is keeping up with repairs, unlike last year when the section north of Beverly Beach and south of Otter Rock turned into a pothole-filled gravel pit until our state rep yanked their chain. They need to get to that section after the work this week. Nasty cracks are starting to appear there as well.
Yes, thank you for your keen for observation Lee.
Hopefully ODOT has a plan to permanently (perhaps steel pilings) fix this dangerous section
of 101. Sporadic patching of this section of highway may not be enough to keep travelers safe for slides or sink holes?
Just walked the beach below the Carmell Knoll slide last week. Quite a bit of water just pouring out of the hillside about half way up. Nothing out of the pipes they drilled several years ago. I’m thinking that can’t be good.
That’s a fascinating observation given that more than a million dollars were spent to install the pipes, I believe to drain a pond east of and above 101. Obviously the slide areas north and south of Moolack Shores are still moving. I’ve noticed a series of what appear to be GPS stations on poles spaced along that stretch of highway. ODOT told me OSU was operating them. So they should be measuring the motion of the slide.
ODOT apparently completed it’s rather so-so patch job today, Wednesday, January 8th. Still a bit bumpy but at least I’m no longer running into a 3- inch vertical ledge perpendicular to the roadway in the northbound lane just south of NE100th.
As for a permanent solution, it’s pretty difficult to do anything about active landslides that isn’t prohibitively expensive.
I hear “the state” won’t allow a long term fix due to beach modification regulations. I hope I’m not on the road when it eventually slides into the ocean.
That section of highway runs across the toe of an immense landslide that extends far to the east. The ocean and gravity keep that block moving slowly downhill. The only real long-term fix is a new highway that swings way inland east of the moving block .. and that has all kinds of environmental engineering issues, too. So, in lieu of that very expensive solution, ODOT does the best it can with patching the highway. There are several other stretches of Hwy 101 with similar irresolvable geologic problems such as Hoostenaden Creek south of Gold Beach.