Received the following news article via email with no date nor source of the article. Email was dated 2-2-08.
Amtrak service closure extended
The massive Frazier landslide blocking train tracks east of Oakridge will keep Amtrak’s Coast Starlight off the rails until at least mid-February as Union Pacific crews battle bad weather to clear the line.
Both the northbound and southbound Coast Starlight runs (trains 14 and 11, respectively) that ferry travelers from Seattle to Los Angeles are canceled through Feb. 14, according to an Amtrak news release. Other regional Amtrak trains and buses will continue serving California, Oregon and Washington.
A week of intense precipitation has dumped more than 2 feet of snow at the site of the slide, slowing cleanup and making it impossible to predict just when the tracks will be cleared, Union Pacific spokeswoman Zoe Richmond said.
“We’re at the mercy of the weather, so we’re not putting a date on it,” Richmond said.
Railroad and contract crews with dozens of excavators, dump trucks and other heavy machinery are working to move more than 2.3 million cubic yards of mud and debris, an amount the size of a football field, reaching as high as the 108-story Sears Tower in Chicago, she said.
Workers have recovered about 700,000 board feet of timber, a mix of Douglas fir and cedar trees that Union Pacific loaded onto rail cars to haul away. Some of the downed wood will be put back into streams to create both resting and spawning habitat for salmon and bull trout, Willamette National Forest Service spokeswoman Judy McHugh said. The rest will be available for purchase through a competitive bid process.
Forest Service geologists who have had a look at the area where the slide began doubt that a 1992 clear-cut and logging road caused the land and trees to give way. The slide ripped out soil more than 10 feet deep, well below the root zone of the trees, said Mark Leverton, a Forest Service geologist on the Middle Fork Ranger District.“Once you get to a depth of failure of (more than) 10 feet, then rooting strength is no longer a factor,” he said.
Of the 60-acre slide, about 5 acres began in the harvested area. The slide is comprised of an upper 20 acres where the failure originated and another 40-acre path where trees and debris cascaded down the mountain and covered thousands of feet of track in two locations.
Leverton said tree growth in the area suggests that the slope isn’t prone to sliding. Trees there grow straight without the kinks that suggest previous slides, he said. “When you have a slope fail in a place where there’s not a big history of slope failure, you naturally start looking at what changed,” Leverton said.
It will take a more thorough assessment of the slope in the spring to confirm the initial analysis, Leverton said.
“There’s a lot that we don’t know about it and we may never know,” he said.