After nearly a month of chaos and speculation, the City of San Diego broke ground Halloween day on what may become a long process of stabilizing, then repairing Soledad Mountain Road after the Oct. 3 landslide that left 13 homes uninhabitable.
“This is just the first day. Let’s see how the progress goes,” said Hossein Ruhi, an engineer hired by the city. “I expect the road will be completed in four to six months.”
On Oct. 31, Hazard Construction, a company hired by the city, began the first phase of stabilizing the road. The engineers and workers are drilling holes and “filling them with steel and concrete to form sheer pins … to stabilize the soil above the landslide,” said Jamal Batta, deputy city engineer, in a letter to the residents.
According to Ruhi, this first area in which city crews have begun to dig, on the Desert View Drive side of Soledad Mountain Road, doesn’t require much stabilizing ” it is safe.
The crews will then jump to the other side of the hole, where they will stabilize that area before finishing in the middle of the slide plane.
“I expect it will take about a maximum time of four weeks to safeguard [the area],” Ruhi said.
Meanwhile, geotechnical experts representing the city have been working with experts hired by the homeowners to find the cause of the slide. This has involved digging many holes and installing instruments such as inclinometers to determine if any further movement has occurred.
In a press release, Mayor Jerry Sanders said that experts have also installed peizometers, which are instruments that test for groundwater.
While experts and the city continue to collect data, six homes are red-tagged, meaning the owners cannot enter, and seven homeowners cannot spend the night in their yellow-tagged houses, said Carol A. Drummond, public information officer with the City of San Diego.
Drummond said she and others from the city are on site working to help residents find a way to get back inside their homes quickly, but until everything’s sorted out, she doesn’t have any answers or a time frame for re-entry.
“They are what they are,” Drummond said. “They’ve been designated as dangerous.”