MONTEREY COUNTY– Travelers are reminded that due to rain in the forecast, daily convoy passage on Highway 1 will be cancelled for Thursday April 4, and Friday April 5, at the repair site south of the Rocky Creek Bridge.
Crews will be on site during all rain events to inspect for any changes in site conditions.
Convoys are expected to resume on Saturday April 6, at 8 am. Engineers will continue to monitor the site for any significant changes and the public will be advised of any modifications to this schedule.
During the 8 am convoy window today, crews counted 157 vehicles passing through in the northbound direction with 165 vehicles passing by in the southbound direction.
This week crews added gravel to the drainage ditch off the shoulder of the northbound lane to ensure that it is able to continue to provide drainage through the site. Crews were also able to place fabric down and pave over the gravel-filled ditch and part of the dirt shoulder of the northbound lane to gain extra room in the travel lane.
Crews are continuing to focus on strategies to stabilize the edge of the roadway and work will continue once the rain event passes.
Updates on the status of the closure of Highway 1 at the Rocky Creek Bridge will be provided as more information becomes available.
Road information and updates can also be found on Caltrans District 5 Social Media platforms: Twitter at: @CaltransD5, Facebook at: Caltrans Central Coast (District 5) and Instagram at: Caltrans_D5.
The trouble with “French drains” (aka gravel-filled) is that they slow the rate of runoff, increasing the potential for seepage through any cracks or other openings, which can clog with fines. Is this intuition or engineering? in the late sixtiesI tried to explain this to some engineers who had designed them to act as sub-drains under a deep fill embankment–the result was a failure of the embankment that closed five lanes and required the construction of an expensive retaining wall. That’s an entirely different context, but it does illustrate that folklore is a cancer on engineering.