Caltrans weighs options for fixing battered mountain road Highway 330

State transportation officials say it could be a year or more before Highway 330 in the San Bernardino Mountains is open to traffic again. Parts of the twisting mountain roadway slid away during last month's storms.

Caltrans is considering two possible repair options.

One plan, says Caltrans district chief Ray Wolfe, is a little like rebuilding a mountain – packing tons of displaced earth back into place. "It's digging out all the disturbed material first, getting it all out; you gotta stockpile all that material, and then using geo-fabric between the layers and just building it up."

Synthetic geo-fabric acts like a supportive membrane between layers of compressed earth. Wolfe explained the work while standing at the edge of an enormous gash a few miles up the 330.

Hunks of broken blacktop poke through layers of mud in the gully below. Wolfe says scooping out the muck, removing boulders and busted-up cement, and rebuilding the 600-foot embankment could take about a year. "But I don't know yet because I don't have surveys to tell me the extent of what I need to rebuild."

Engineers expect to finish core sampling surveys by next week. If the embankment can't be rebuilt, they'll have to construct an overpass to bridge the hundred foot chasm – a process that could take a couple years.

And Caltrans district chief Ray Wolfe says this isn't the only problem that needs fixing. "Actually, I have five locations that are pretty significant on 330. Some are buried in snow so I can't do a whole lot there. There's another spot a little further down that we're going to be working on in the next couple of days. I need to fix that to bring the equipment necessary to fix this location."

Whatever fix Caltrans chooses, Highway 330 will remain closed until the work is done. The agency plans to update mountain residents on the work at a series of public meetings in the days ahead.