Another Mudslide Slows U.S. 95 Traffic No Motorists Caught In Slide, But Both Lanes Blocked Briefly

Like a wound that won’t heal, the North Hill started bleeding mud again on Tuesday, blocking traffic on U.S. Highway 95.

The mudslide was minor, and transportation workers quickly cleared the debris off the roadway.

The slide occurred about noon at the site of the rebuilt section of highway.

The highway a mile north of Bonners Ferry was destroyed when a massive mudslide tore out the hillside in October. That slide, triggered by a construction project to realign the highway, closed the road for three weeks.

Tuesday’s slide, however, closed both lanes for only about 45 minutes.

Then workers opened one lane as they cleared the muck off the road and monitored the hillside for more sloughing.

No cars were caught in the slide.

“It’s nothing unusual and is not beyond what was expected to happen,” said Barbara Babic, spokeswoman for the Idaho Department of Transportation.

The sloughing happened in the new cut above the highway bypass that was constructed to reopen the highway in November.

“That cut didn’t have any snow cover on it,” explained Bob Graham, Boundary County Disaster Services coordinator. “It froze, it warmed up and snowed, saturating the ground. When it thawed out the last couple of days, the material on the north end of the raw cut slid down on the surface of the bypass.”

Graham said highway workers cleared off the roadway quickly with a front-end loader, but “there was still some unraveling going on.”

So the front-end loader remained, and flaggers remained to guide alternating one-way traffic through the bypass, until the situation stabilized several hours later. Because the bypass was constructed late in the year, efforts to grow grass to protect it from freezing and thawing were unsuccessful.

“If the weather conditions hit in just the right sequence, it’s not that big of a surprise,” Graham said. “We will probably have a few more of those.”