New drone images released by the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office show recent damage to California’s iconic Highway 1, where part of the road collapsed after heavy rains threw it into the ocean last week.
The footage shows a large part of the highway still flooded and covered with the wreckage of recent rains and landslides.
At the point of collapse, about 45 miles south of Carmel in the Big Sur area, both lanes of the road were completely destroyed, with a huge hole tilted towards the Pacific Ocean instead.
The footage from the sheriff’s office shows water still running down the destroyed part of the road, which on Friday had fallen into the sea.
The collapse comes at a time when California has seen major landslides, particularly in areas burned during the previous season’s forest fires. Landslides often follow forest fires.
“Heavy rains are always a challenge, but when you have fires and rains a few months apart, even a few years apart, you generate a whole new category of risks,” Stanford University environmental studies Professor Chris Field, who helped write a 2012 United Nations report on climate change and disaster risk worldwide, previously told NBC News.
Scientists say climate change is making these associated disasters even more common.
“Be aware that you cannot travel through Big Sur to southern California … If you are coming from the south, you cannot travel to northern California,” the sheriff’s office told residents, as emergency teams they work to assess the damage, clean up the debris and figure out how to rebuild.
