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LAKEPORT, Calif. – A landslide along Hill Road across from Sutter Lakeside Hospital in the north Lakeport area has once again caused a seasonal road closure, with a fix unlikely to happen this year.
In February the hillside at Lakeside Heights on the section of Hill Road between Lakeshore Boulevard and Sutter Lakeside Hospital once again collapsed during continuing rainstorms, sending mud and dirt across one lane. The lane that had remained open was finally closed earlier this week.
The hillside has caused repeated wintertime road closures since 2013, the year the slide began to destroy homes in the subdivision above.
The county settled a $4.5 million lawsuit with the homeowners in 2017 over the causes of the slide, which originated at the subdivision where homes were first built in the early 1980s, as Lake County News has reported. County officials said the settlement wasn’t an admission of wrongdoing.
In the meantime, the landslide’s impact on the roadway has remained a seasonal issue.
“It continues to move,” Public Works Director Scott De Leon said of the landslide. “It could continue to get worse.”
De Leon said he had hoped the recent break in the rain would stabilize the hillside and allow it to remain open to one lane of traffic.
However, the storms that followed that break led to De Leon’s department closing the road completely from Downing Drive and Lakeshore Boulevard on Monday after the mudslide moved across the remaining lane. Property owners are still allowed to access Lakeside Heights.
Public Works said this week that there is no estimate at this time as to when the roadway will be reopened.
Lakeside Heights subdivision resident Randall Fitzgerald said that when one lane of traffic was still open, people had been driving through the area at high speed. His wife almost had a head-on collision when a truck ignored the one-way sign and almost plowed into her.
Fitzgerald also noted that there were numerous wrong-way drivers, and one day he observed a sheriff’s deputy writing a ticket to someone who had gone the wrong way.
There is a plan for a permanent fix of the road and hillside. “We have a project that we’re in the process of getting designed,” De Leon said.
The county hired Quincy Engineering to be the consulting engineers, with design still under way, he said.
Previously, the county had discussed possible solutions including a gabion wall, which is made up of baskets of rocks that allows for drainage. De Leon said that type of wall was written up for the purposes of getting a preliminary project submitted to the state.
“The design hasn’t really been defined,” De Leon said.
He explained that part of the design process is doing the necessary geotechnical work in order to determine what is the most cost effective solution. A gabion wall could be one solution, but there also can be others.
The county has received state grant funding for the project, De Leon said, explaining that the grant funding is supported in phases.
“Right now we’re in the design phase and once we go to construction then we’ll submit the paperwork for that,” he said.
De Leon said he doesn’t know if the project can be designed and built in this next year’s construction season. Right now, they want to be bidding out projects ready for summer construction, and that project isn’t quite at that point.
“The timing is kinda stacking up against us here,” De Leon said. “We should be bidding something right now and we’re not anywhere near that.”
The availability of contractors and the longer the rains last – the forecast calls for April to start off with still more rain – impact the construction window, with De Leon explaining that everything has to be done by Oct. 15. “By the time you back in the construction time and bidding, the window of time is closing very quickly.”
Meanwhile, up in the Lakeside Heights subdivision, Fitzgerald said he has been wondering about the state grant for the project and what happened to the Quincy Engineering report on constructing the wall.
Fitzgerald said everything on top of the hillside seems stable.
However, the hillside itself, on both the Hill Road and Downing Drive sides, is “obviously slipping and sliding with that big old fallen oak tree now occupying the former north to south lane of Hill Road,” he said.
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