This should have an interesting effect on truck traffic. That corridor sees thousands of trucks a day.
Holy mole. I’ve driven the LA Phoenix I-10 corridor a lot. Those pics freak me out. And if you had to bypass that bridge, I sure as hell hope you have more than a half a tank of gas.
Can’t we just drop an aircraft carrier in there?
Caltrans’ current detour route runs from Blaine (nearly at the CA/AZ border) southwest to El Centro (nearly at the CA/BC border) west to San Diego, where–depending on your final destination–the detour takes either Interstate 5 north to LA or Interstate 15 north to San Bernardino. It’s a HUGE reroute.
EDIT: this is the tractor-trailer detour. Normal cars and trucks may have an easier time taking advantage of state highways through the desert, but they still have to go down nearly to El Centro to come back up by Palm Desert.
Bravo-- hundreds and hundreds of incidents like this, and perhaps California can crawl out of its drought.
As I was sitting on my front porch yesterday watching it rain, I was staggered by the amount of water wasted by just letting the excess run into the storm sewers and thence to the ocean. Along the way it picks up pollutants and becomes useless. Indeed, many of the San Diego beaches will be closed for the next couple of days until the rainwater runoff gets diluted and flushed into the greater Pacific.
Damn. Not even the small mercies are worthwhile.
And this sort of thing is exactly why you need to spend money on infrastructure. The extra time taken, money spent diesel burnt, and inconvenience, pollution and misery caused by this one incident can be multiplied by any number of other crumbling bridges, dams and tunnels.
And we’ve just had a huge recession where people with the right skills were unemployed, funds were the cheapest in history and all that was lacking was the political will to get this done.
This level of neglect is little short of deliberate, wilful idiocy.
That was January - Just sayin
How much rain actually fell there? (The reports say LA got 0.36 inches, but Desert Center’s out in the center of the desert, an hour or more east of Palm Springs.)
Of course, even if they got a few inches of rain, that shouldn’t be enough to make a bridge collapse.
Per the Riverside Press-Enterprise, some places in the desert got 4 inches of rain. The flash floods resulting from that kind of rainfall would be insane.
You got it. Tax cuts, man. That’ll get things movin’.
Yup. In the desert, it’s not how much rain falls, but how it drains off and channels. Even small amounts of precipitation can result in pretty significant local flooding. And this wasn’t an insignificant amount of rain…
[quote=“billstewart, post:11, topic:62078”]
How much rain actually fell there?[/quote]
6.7 inches, at 1.5 inches/hr when the bridge went out.
That’s a lot of rain. Furthermore, go look at the Google satellite maps of the area. The freeway cuts across a large plain with a south-to-north downslope. Dozens of drains go under the freeway, and each has a berm funnel feeding it. Any of these could fail in such a storm situation.
Jesus… at least no one was hurt in the collapse. But @Purplecat is correct in that we need to start spending on infrastructure, or something disastrous is going to happen that’s going to kill a ton of people.
Never realized that I-10 (at least in that area) was considered the “Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway”.
I bet this record rainfall means that getting you SoCalians to save water is a completely lost cause.
Jerks.
