End of the road: Landslide shuts famed Californian Highway 1 as big chunk falls into the sea

By Daily Mail Reporter

The Pacific crashed into the cliffs below the highway - the most scenic in America. Photo AP

A 40ft section of California's Highway 1 fell into the Pacific after a landslide. Photo AP

It is the most scenic highway in America, but a big chunk of California’s Highway 1 has fallen into the sea after a landslide.

Stunned drivers watched as a forty-foot section tumbled into the Pacific below after several days of rain.

The landslide, at 5pm on Wednesday, happened 12 miles from Carmel. A two-mile stretch is now closed for repairs which are expected to take several days.

Despite being new asphalt, all of the southbound lane is now gone, and the soil under the northbound lane also is giving way.

The California Highway Patrol closed the lane at Palo Colorado Road and drivers going north were stopped at the Bixby Creek Bridge.

Fortunately, no one was injured in the slide. A CHP dispatcher said: ‘Nobody went down, no people got hurt.’

State transportation workers are now scrambling to make repairs. It’s not immediately clear what caused the slide or how long the highway will be closed

Despite being new asphalt, all of the southbound lane is now gone, and the soil under the northbound lane also is giving way.

The California Highway Patrol closed the lane at Palo Colorado Road and drivers going north were stopped at the Bixby Creek Bridge.

Fortunately, no one was injured in the slide. A CHP dispatcher said: ‘Nobody went down, no people got hurt.’

State transportation workers are now scrambling to make repairs. It’s not immediately clear what caused the slide or how long the highway will be closed.

Is The Scariest Earthquake Is Yet to Come ?

The tsunami that struck Japan was the third in a series of events that now put California at risk.

Simon Winchester for NEWSWEEK, March 15, 2011.

San Andreas Fault Line

All of those broken bones in northern Japan, all of those broken lives and those broken homes prompt us to remember what in calmer times we are invariably minded to forget: the most stern and chilling of mantras, which holds, quite simply, that mankind inhabits this earth subject to geological consent—which can be withdrawn at any time.

For hundreds, maybe for thousands of people, this consent was withdrawn with shocking suddenness—all geological events are sudden, and all are unexpected if not necessarily entirely unanticipated—at 2:46 on this past clear, cool spring Friday afternoon. One moment all were going about their quotidian business—in offices, on trains, in rice fields, in stores, in schools, in warehouses, in shrines—and then the ground began to shake. At first, the shock was merely a much stronger and longer version of the temblors to which most Japanese are well accustomed. There came a stunned silence, as there always does. But then, the difference: a few minutes later a low rumble from the east, and in a horrifying replay of the Indian Ocean tragedy of just some six years before, the imagery of which is still hauntingly in all the world’s mind, the coastal waters off the northern Honshu vanished, sucked mysteriously out to sea.

San Andreas Fault Line - NASA

The rumbling continued, people then began to spy a ragged white line on the horizon, and, with unimaginable ferocity, the line became visible as a wall of waves sweeping back inshore at immense speed and at great height. Just seconds later and these Pacific Ocean waters hit the Japanese seawalls, surmounted them with careless ease, and began to claw across the land beyond in what would become a dispassionate and detached orgy of utter destruction.

We all now know, and have for 50 years, that geography is the ultimate reason behind the disaster. Japan is at the junction of a web of tectonic-plate boundaries that make it more peculiarly vulnerable to ground-shaking episodes than almost anywhere else—and it is a measure of Japanese engineering ingenuity, of social cohesion, of the ready acceptance of authority and the imposition of necessary discipline that allows so many to survive these all-too-frequent displays of tectonic power.

But geography is not the only factor in this particular and acutely dreadful event. Topography played an especially tragic role in the story, too—for it is an axiom known to all those who dwell by high-tsunami-risk coastlines that when the sea sucks back, you run: you run inland and, if at all possible, you run uphill. But in this corner of northeast Japan, with its wide plains of rice meadows and ideal factory sites and conveniently flat airport locations, there may well be a great deal of inland—but there is almost no uphill.

Such mountains as exist are far away, blue and distant in the west. All here is coastal plain. And so the reality is this: if a monstrous wave is chasing you inland at the speed of a jetliner, and if the flat topography all around denies you any chance of sprinting to a hilltop to try to escape its wrath, then you can make no mistake—it will catch you, it will drown you, and its forces will pulverize you out of all recognition as a thing of utter insignificance, which of course, to a tsunami, all men and women and their creations necessarily must be.