Rock fall in Logan Canyon adds to winter driving troubles
A video of an early morning rock fall in Logan Canyon was posted to Facebook this afternoon.
The video, published by The Trails Cache, shows cars navigating through the oncoming lane of traffic to avoid several large boulders and blocks of ice that fell off the mountainside and onto the road.
The rock fall took place near Second Dam and was due to “drastic freezing and thawing” according to the caption on the video taken at 6:40a.m.
This adds to the plethora of weather-related incidents Cache Valley has had to face this winter.
Just this week, winter weather advisories and storm warnings were pushed out by the National Weather Service for the foot of snow Logan was expecting this week.
The Utah Department of Transportation also posted a road weather alert to their Twitter page that included a graphic of what areas of northern and central Utah could expect the heaviest snowfall on the roads.
US-89 was also closed on Wednesday because of the extreme weather.
As reported by ABC4, the closure came as winter storms caused “white-out conditions” and a semi-truck blocked both directions of travel on the highway.
At the time, UDOT was asking drivers to find an alternate route due to the closure and poor driving conditions.
When asked what UDOT’s procedure was when handling roadblock incidents such as this morning’s rock fall, Mitch Shaw, Senior Communications Manager at UDOT, said that they have, “several canyon roads throughout the state and rockslides can happen sometimes. Whenever one occurs, we conduct an investigation to see how and why it happened.”
Shaw gave other examples of similar incidences in the past.
“Last year we had one occur outside of Ogden Canyon. We investigated and emplaced mitigation efforts. Depending upon what we find with this one we could implement some mitigation efforts, such as a retaining wall,” he said. “Safety is our top priority.”
The roadway near Second Dam has since been cleared and traffic is again flowing smoothly.
-Michael.Popa@usu.edu