Closed U.S. 95 Stretch May Never Reopen State Seeks Alternative To North Hill Route

Travelers on U.S. Highway 95 may never again careen down the curves of Bonners Ferry’s North Hill.

Friday’s massive mudslide has so undermined that stretch of road that the Idaho Department of Transportation likely will abandon it.

Now, crumbling pavement dangles over empty space and mud.

“We’re very close to ruling out ever opening up that old highway,” district engineer Scott Stokes said Tuesday. “We’re thinking our better strategy will be to find a new route. … I see us going out and around on the county road network.”

Department officials are planning a public information meeting Thursday to explain their plans, Stokes said.

Meanwhile, school officials are exploring more options for getting kids to school.

School may open Thursday if buses can safely negotiate Nichol’s Road, a road now limited to emergency traffic. School officials plan to ride a bus over the route this morning and try to secure permission from the private property owner of the road.

“We feel it’s the most safe of the two routes that are available,” said Superintendent Reid Straabe.

School will not open Thursday if the route isn’t acceptable. Varsity sports are continuing on a voluntary basis, however.

“We’ll take it a few days at a time,” Straabe said.

School officials decided against a plan to open school without bus transportation between the north end of the county and Bonners Ferry. That would have left junior and senior high students from the north end of the county with few ways to get to school. Nor did Boundary County Commissioners want to increase traffic along the county’s two alternative routes.

Now, the emergency route is designated for emergency vehicles and road workers only, but flaggers are having a hard time stopping some drivers.

“Some are just ignoring the flaggers,” said Mike Weland, Boundary County’s public information officer.

The state has asked the Federal Highway Administration for the money it needs to improve local detour routes. The rough back roads being used are off-limits to trucks and buses, and slow going for cars.

One driver rolled her vehicle on the Westside Road Tuesday afternoon, stopping traffic. Farmers rushed to stabilize the teetering car, which threatened to slide down the bank.

“There’s a 25 mile-per-hour speed limit, but people are trying to fly,” Weland said.

Commercial traffic is being routed 112 miles in a loop that goes through Montana and emerges in Sandpoint.

That’s little help to some area businesses, such as Bonners Ferry Truss Company, which is struggling to get its trusses to construction jobs from its plant north of the slide.

“Financially, it’s impacting the county dramatically. I’m receiving calls all day long,” said County Commissioner Kevin Lederhos. “It’s nightmarish.

“We’ve opened the agenda as best we can to take care of this emergency,” he added. “If we don’t, we won’t have a need for a courthouse, because the county will be broke.”

County officials are working with the Idaho Transportation Department on a proposed third alternate local route that would be significantly shorter than the District 5 road or Westside Road.

“It’s not going to be a one-day project,” Lederhos said. Authorities are not naming its location until they can negotiate agreements with the landowners, he said.

For the moment, engineers are focusing their attention on stabilizing the slide area, Scott said. Geological monitoring systems are in place.

Although power was quickly restored Friday evening, utility lines remain down. A stretch of Union Pacific Railroad track was left dangling in the air.

The $18 million project to realign the accident-prone North Hill began last summer. The mudslide buried heavy equipment being used to build a stable road bed below the existing highway.

“A lot of people think it’s the embankment we were building that came down from the hill,” Stokes said, noting that the slide began above the work zone.

“We had stripped vegetation and trees off the area where the highway would go. But that’s not what caused this big problem.”

Asked whether it was possible that removing the vegetation below undermined the slope above, Stokes said: “I wouldn’t rule anything out.”

It will be awhile before a report on the cause of the slide is completed, Stokes said.

MEETING State and local officials have scheduled a public meeting at 1 p.m. Thursday at the county extension office in Bonners Ferry to discuss the U.S. Highway 95 mudslide.