Sinkhole leads to Nice-Lucerne Cutoff closure; road expected to reopen Wednesday
- Elizabeth Larson
- Posted On
NICE, Calif. – The discovery on Tuesday morning of a sinkhole that developed underneath a portion of the bridge that crosses the Rodman Slough has temporarily closed the Nice-Lucerne Cutoff.
The Lake County Department of Public Works announced the road closure shortly before noon on Tuesday, with the Lake County Sheriff’s Office sending out a Nixle alert to community members at that time.
Road Superintendent Lyle Swartz told Lake County News that he went to the cutoff on Tuesday morning and found what he described as a “big cavern” that had developed under the entire road on the edge of the platform on the bridge’s west side.
Swartz said Clear Lake’s flooding earlier this year is responsible for this latest road issue.
He said the high water got underneath the bridge footings and washed out all the fill material that had been located against the abutments.
Basically, everyone was driving over about only a foot of asphalt and nobody knew it – that is, until the hole appeared, he said.
“We caught it just in time,” Swartz said. “Nobody got hurt.”
He said it took a few hours to get Public Works crews to the scene and close the road.
On Tuesday afternoon, there were four holes on the platform that Swartz said were the result of jackhammering into the bridge to fill the bigger hole underneath. The largest of those holes measured about 2 feet wide.
Swartz said a cement truck brought five yards of two-sack slurry and used the jackhammered holes to insert the new material.
He explained that two sack slurry doesn’t have big rock and only contains two bags of cement, thus the name. It’s the kind of material used for culverts and is easier to dig out.
Public Works crews will finish patching the holes and picking up the signs, and by 4 p.m. Wednesday the road should be reopened, he said.
Later this year, once the lake level recedes, county crews will dig in deeper around the bridge footings and pour new cement to protect the footings. Swartz said they want to dig the footings deeper so the lake can’t get underneath them.
“We may not have to disturb this then,” he said of the newly poured slurry.
The repairs later in the year won’t require another road closure, Swartz said.
In his 38 years with the county, Swartz has seen plenty of floods and fires, and dealt with the necessary repairs to keep roads open.
The Nice-Lucerne Cutoff was last closed for emergency road repairs in February 2017, after water crossed the road and did damage during that year’s winter flooding, as Lake County News reported. At that time, the roadway was closed for nearly a week and a half.
Swartz said people get upset when the Nice-Lucerne Cutoff is closed. He joked that people aren’t as mad about closing the Golden Gate Bridge.
That’s probably due to the amount of traffic the road sees daily.
Public Works Director Scott De Leon estimated that the average traffic on that road is 8,000 vehicles per day.
“It’s one of the highest traveled roads in the county,” he said.
De Leon said the Nice-Lucerne Cutoff, Bottle Rock Road and Scotts Valley Road are the three main arterial roads in the county based on average daily traffic counts.
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