Mt. Lemmon road sinkhole

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djalbin
Smilies Run Amok
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Mt. Lemmon road sinkhole

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One more thing to look out for while riding Mt. Lemmon.

http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/150967

Mt. Lemmon road sinkhole fixed; highway open again
By Andrea Kelly
arizona daily star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 10.14.2006

A sinkhole that opened Thursday afternoon on the Mount Lemmon highway was repaired and the road reopened to traffic by 11 a.m. Friday.
The county plans to do more work to prevent future problems.
A 3-foot-wide hole in the roadway looked suspicious to a bus driver taking students up to Summerhaven after school Thursday, said Deputy Dawn Barkman, a Pima County Sheriff's Department spokeswoman.
The hole opened up a short distance below the General Hitchcock Camp-ground.
The driver stopped the bus and called 911. Officials discovered the hole was 25 feet in diameter, 17 feet deep and mostly covered by asphalt, said Annabelle Quihuis, spokeswoman for the Pima County Department of Transportation.
A damaged drain had caused water to run under the road, eroding the road's supporting material, Barkman said.
The damage was a carryover from heavy rains that pummeled the area in July and August and caused flooding in lower canyons, said Dave Cummings, Transportation Department division manager for maintenance operations.
Those rains had damaged the road at milepost 9.8, and the sinkhole was at milepost 10.5, Cummings said. Those locations share a stabilization wall that the water runs through, he said.
"The storm drain capacity was exceeded by the flow" in July, he said. "All of the surface water caused damage to the retaining wall," causing washout from under the road.
The temporary repairs eliminate the danger of road collapse or failure, Cummings said, and the county plans to repair the damage permanently in the coming months.
A consultant will assess the damage to the retaining walls and the county will likely reinforce those walls, he said.
Sheriff's deputies used rescue techniques Thursday night to get people across the sinkhole and into Sun Tran buses.
People who were on the mountain at the time of the closure were secured to ropes as they walked across the area, Barkman said.
They were bused to Sun Tran's Rincon station, where they took other transportation home.
Transportation Department workers filled in the hole with asphalt overnight after the visitors got down from the mountain.

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