Vancouver faces Olympian hurdle as rockslide cuts off vital road

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- It almost cost Vancouver the 2010 Olympic Games five years ago.

Now, the narrow and precarious cliff-side Sea to Sky Highway is coming back to haunt the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee a year and a half before the big event.

Thousands of cubic feet of jagged boulders laid strewn 33 feet high, blocking the vital artery linking Vancouver and Whistler, the Games' two primary venue cities. The rock slide Tuesday night near Porteau Bluffs south of Squamish is the highway's biggest in a dozen years. It is expected to shut down the road for five days and has conjured disastrous visions of stranded athletes and tourists during the 2010 Olympics. The cliffs above the highway are geologically prone to weak planes of rock.

It will take days to clear the truck-sized chunks of rock blocking the sinuous artery that links the Lower Mainland with Squamish, Whistler and nearby communities. In the meantime, the roughly 13,800 vehicles that rely on the road daily are out of luck: The only other route to Whistler and Squamish from the Lower Mainland requires a seven-hour detour.

Concern for worker safety will slow more than usual the arduous task of blasting the massive chunks of rock into smaller pieces to be carted away by the truckload. Geotechnical engineers scaled the ridge of the cliff checking for stability yesterday afternoon, at one point bolting as bowling-ball-sized rocks tumbled off the cliff.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police sniffer dogs combed the site Wednesday and didn't detect any people trapped beneath the rubble, but Squamish RCMP Corporal Dave Ritchie said it's impossible to tell for sure until all the rock is cleared.

The slide caused at least one close call: Whistler resident Luis Araujo was traveling by bus from the Vancouver International Airport Tuesday night around 11:20 p.m. when he heard what sounded like thunder.

"We didn't know what was going on. It was like driving through a massive hailstorm of rocks and debris," he said. "We could just hear the whole mountain just crash behind us. It was unbelievable."

Bus driver Peter Skeels sped up and pulled the 24-passenger bus out from under the 560,000 cubic feet of plummeting rock. Both he and Araujo emerged without a scratch; the only damage was to the vehicle, which lost most of its windows and had its sides punctured.

"(Skeels's driving) really saved our lives. Otherwise we would have been under the rubble right now," Araujo said.

B.C. Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon said Wednesday that it still isn't clear what caused the slide, but the region's weeks of dry weather followed by a heavy rainfall could have destabilized the rock. He said no construction was going on nearby.

Falcon said engineers have determined that an overhang on the cliff is dangerously unstable and will have to be blasted and removed to enable workers to operate safely underneath. He said crews are trying to determine how to install explosives under the cliff and that the blasting will probably take place today.

"It's unstable enough that they can't risk having the workers clearing down below," he said.

B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell said that the province will do an inventory of the entire highway over the next couple of years to ensure that it's safe.

(With reports from Justine Hunter in Victoria, Sunny Dhillon in Lions Bay and Cathryn Atkinson in Squamish)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)