Major Landslide in Willamette National Forest Caused by 1992 Clearcut

Railroad Track Repairs Will Go on Through March
By Susan Palmer
Eugene Register-Guard
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OAKRIDGE — It will take at least another six weeks and millions of dollars to clear away the massive landslide that demolished the Union Pacific Railroad tracks eight miles southeast of this rugged mountain community in January.

But conditions on the mountain are still too unstable for railroad officials to know just when the cleanup will be finished or how much it will cost to get the job done, said Bill Van Trump, assistant vice president of engineering and maintenance for Union Pacific.

The slide has severed Union Pacific's main north-south line in Western Oregon. The 15 daily freight trains using the tracks have been rerouted. Some are detouring through Bend; others have to go as far east as Salt Lake City, creating 24- to 48-hour delays, Union Pacific spokeswoman Zoe Richmond said.

Amtrak's Coast Starlight trains between Seattle and Los Angeles remained canceled, although regional trains still carry travelers in California, Oregon and Washington.

Meanwhile, on Coyote Mountain where the slide occurred, a half-dozen contractors with crews totaling about 150 workers and more than 100 machines are stabilizing the base of the slope with gravel and rock crushed on site from the landslide debris itself. Soil and silt too fine to be used are being trucked to a nearby location.

Small landslides are still occurring, one most recently on Friday morning that shut down work for a period of time, officials said. Three spotters stand watch along the upper portion of the slide to give the alarm to workers below when the ground shows signs of moving.

Water from snow melt continues to sluice down the hillside.
The Jan. 19 slide is the most serious natural disaster to hit Union Pacific's Oregon main line in 40 years, Van Trump said. Nationally, the most comparable cleanup effort he has overseen occurred three years ago when flooding and mudslides in a canyon between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas washed out track along a 40-mile stretch and took Union Pacific 17 days to fix.

This slide is significantly more complex, and the cleanup effort has been hampered as much by the unstable hillside and downed trees as by recent storms that during one week dumped 10 feet of snow in the area, Van Trump said.

The slide, covering 60 acres, obliterated 1,500 feet of track in one spot and another 150 feet below that where the railroad switches back down the steep slope.

The lower section of the track has been replaced, but crews face weeks of work to repair the larger upper section. The slide destroyed the rail bed, tore out the tracks and scoured away another 30 or 40 feet of hillside as trees, mud and boulders thundered downward.

Geologists believe the slide started in a section of the Willamette National Forest with trees well over 100 years old. As that portion of the ground gave way, part of the slope that had been clear cut in 1992 slumped down, leaving large vertical gashes on the hill and boulders the size of travel trailers sticking up amid the rubble.

About 700,000 board feet of timber has been recovered, the large logs stacked neatly along the railroad right-of-way in Oakridge. Once all the downed trees have been recovered, the Forest Service will put them up for bid.

The trees that survived along the corridor of the slide show telltale signs of mud 20 to 30 feet up their trunks, evidence of the massive flow that also ripped away their lower branches.

Van Trump speculated that a fierce wind accompanied the slide, whip-sawing some trees so violently that it snapped off their tops.

Union Pacific is working with the U.S. Forest Service to comply with federal environmental regulations as they stabilize the hillside and prepare to rebuild the rail bed and replace the tracks, Van Trump said.

At this point, it's difficult to gauge the economic impact of the landslide.

Oakridge, however, is enjoying an economic boom with full motel rooms and busy restaurants and cafes.
Amtrak is losing about 1,400 riders a day with the shutdown, spokeswoman Vernae Graham said. But winter is a slow season for the passenger carrier.
"We start to see an increase in ridership closer to spring," she said. The loss of rider revenue would have to be balanced against the lack of expense in running the trains, and no one at Amtrak has done the math yet, she said.

The Port of Portland, which runs the marine terminals that handle 14 million tons of freight annually, is still moving cargo, spokesman Josh Thomas said. He has heard of some struggles getting freight moved in and out of the city, but nothing serious.

"They are getting the job done," he said of Union Pacific.
A spokesman for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers said its Northwest members were still working on the trains that have been rerouted.

Some rail fans in online forums have questioned whether a track through slide-prone mountains is a good idea, but Van Trump believes it's a reasonable location. "An interruption every 40 to 50 years in the grand scheme of things is not that big a deal," he said.

Landslides are a natural part of the Cascades, said Fred Swanson, a research geologist with the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station.

"From a geology perspective, stuff falls," he said. "We've got gravity. We've got tectonic forces and volcanic forces pushing rocks up, and they've got to come down. … We talk of these processes as disturbance agents, but geologists don't refer to them that way. They're just part of the land-sculpting phenomenon. This is just one little tick in a multimillion-year history of that river valley."