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A large section of California’s scenic Highway 1 collapsed into the ocean after a thunderstorm on Thursday.
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Officials said the road gave way due to a “slip” that occurs when the ground is so saturated that nothing can hold it back.
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Rebuilding the highway is likely to cost millions of dollars to repair.
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California’s scenic Highway 1 was closed after a winter storm caused a large part of the road to collapse into the ocean below.
Local maintenance crews discovered the damage some 15 miles south of Big Sur on Thursday afternoon, after a night of torrential rain. No one was driving on the stretch of road when it collapsed.
Dramatic photos of the highway posted on social media show a large chunk of the highway missing, leaving the road disconnected.
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Jim Shivers, a spokesman for the California Department of Transportation (Cal trans), said on Friday that the destruction of the highway is called a “slip,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“This is where we lost part of the highway and now we are looking at a project to clean and repair that stretch,” said Shivers, the Chronicle reported. “This is the only place we know where this happened during the storm. Our maintenance team is now patrolling the highway to look for other damage.”
Watch a video of the damage here:
Reconstructing the road will cost millions of dollars to repair, as Caltrans engineers will need to ensure that it meets state standards, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The authorities are also not sure how long it will take to rebuild the stretch of road.
The National Meteorological Service has warned of possible “life-threatening floods and debris flows” in local areas that have been affected by burns from previous forest fires and continuous rains.
On Thursday, the storm quickly moved to southern California the next day, bringing moderate landslides to Orange County and hail to the beaches of Los Angeles County.
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