On Devil’s Slide Wednesday, Caltrans is drilling the third of four holes for an inclinometer to measure the movement of the slide.  The holes are being drilled to 300 feet, versus 200 feet as originally planned.

Caltrans engineers and designers met on site Monday to assess the slide conditions and discuss design concepts. Larger boulders have been reduced with small explosives and rocks were cleared from the road. Broken rocks brought down from the cliff will be used in the roadbed during slide repairs. A rock catchment ditch has been constructed above the road as a precaution against future rock falls.

At Shamrock Ranch, the slipout has been excavated, rocks have been installed on the hillside above the site, and Caltrans is in the process of installing rocks below on top of reinforcing fabric to tie the mass together. Samples of "material oozing from the hillside" were taken from the slide just south of Shamrock Ranch for analysis.

The County Times and the Mercury News look at how the closure of the Devil’s Slide is affecting the Coastside.  The County Times in particular focus on the effect on tourist-oriented businesses.

This past weekend saw less than a tenth of the normal tourist traffic at Pillar Point Harbor, according to harbor district officials. That, in turn, has meant a 25 percent drop in business for nearby seafood restaurant Ketch Joanne. The restaurant also lost 50 percent of its business over Easter weekend.

Albert Dunnes family has owned Ketch Joanne for 35 years. They barely survived the five-month closure of Devils Slide in 1995. But now, for the first time, Dunne said his family is considering leaving the coast and taking the restaurant with them.

The Mercury News has a great quote from Caltrans,

"We go out there and we put our bulldozers on this massive mountain, and they look like Tonka trucks, and you realize that the mountain is a lot stronger than we are," Caltrans spokesman Jeff Weiss said. "In the end, the mountain will win and the slide will be in the sea."

Still, he said, engineers are confident they can fix the slide with new technology that uses a web of cables under the roadbed.

Citing "gross mismanagement" of Klamath River water by the Bush administration,  Rep. Mike Thompson,

R-Bakersfield

(The AP got this wrong. He’s a Democrat from the Northern California coast), is introducing a bill to require the Department of Commerce to complete a recovery plan within six months, budget $45 million toward conservation, and provide $81 million in disaster relief for businesses affected by restrictions on salmon fishing.  Thompson announced the bill at a rally at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco Tuesday, repors the AP in the Monterey Herald.

A freshman gym teacher’s assistant at HMB High School was caught charging $5 a quarter to let students skip showers after class.  The cops describe it as "possible extortion", but the culprit was convinced to return the money.  Police assisted a laundromat patron who was unable to remove her clothes from a washing machine for four hours.  And somebody keyed a car. Click for more true crime.

A dead crow in Moss Beach was found to be carrying West Nile virus, the first case of what the Examiner is reporting could be the most severe season for the disease so far.  We’ve had a wet winter, and there’s plenty of standing water to play host to mosquito larvae.

“I do expect to see at least one human case of West Nile virus originate in San Mateo County this year, but nothing on the order of Sacramento County last year,” which led the state with 177 human cases, said Dean Peterson, director of environmental health for the county. The one human case of the virus reported in the county in 2005 was brought in from outside, Peterson said.

I’ve seen county mosquito abatement trucks on the Coastside a couple of times already since the rains have let up.

Yesterday’s coverage of the Coastside’s communications disruption would have been impossible without the contributions of the community.

Coincidentally, I spent Saturday night in Palo Alto.  When I woke in my hotel room, I had no idea what was happening on the Coastside. When I checked my mail in the morning, I found a posting from a reader about the outage and was able to get a story online by 10:00am.  I was able to supplement this by talking to the Sheriff’s Office. Another reader talked to the AT&T crew on the scene and emailed us photos from a Starbucks on the Bayside.  Other readers contributed important information about what services were disrupted and how they were affected.  We updated the story continuously until about 10:00pm.  Until Sunday evening, the only public information about the outage, besides a 9:00am story (projecting a 10:00am restoration of service) from Bay Cities News on KCBS.com, was the ongoing story on Coastsider.

The credit for that goes not to Coastsider, but to the community.  Without your attention and assistance, we couldn’t have done it.

DUI in El Granada, an air compressor stolen from a construction site, a warrant arrest in Princeton, and a car stolen from Pescadero is found on Highway 1. Click for details.

Services have been restored on the Coastside after a landslide cut an AT&T fiber optic cable, disrupting communications on the Coastside from Montara to Pescadero. This report is compiled from reader reports as well as interviews and not everything here can be confirmed.

Landlines: It appears that few or no calls could be made to or from the Coastside, but that some calls were possible within the Coastside. Automatic teller service and credit card verification services were also disrupted.  Phone service began coming back at about 4pm. DSL was unavailable until about 8:30pm.

Cellular: Sprint and T-Mobile cellular service were disrupted. One reader reported that his Verizon cellular service was unavailable until 7am. Several readers found that they could get Cingular service near the junction of Highways 1 and 92 on Sunday afternoon, but not north or south of Half Moon Bay on Highway 1.

Comcast Internet: Television service was not disrupted, but as of Sunday night, Cable internet was not available and Comcast had told one customer that they would not call a technical crew until Monday morning.

The landslide—off Highway 92 at 10pm on Saturday night— took out an AT&T fiber optic cable to the Coastside. Sgt. John Gonzales of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office says that the outage was in a location where AT&T couldn’t take heavy equipment, but crews hiked in to fix the problem.

AT&T installed a 100 to 150 foot temporary above-ground splice to the underground line west of Skyline and below the construction site at Skylawn Cemetary [Google satellite photo] according to one Coastsider who talked to the repair crew at about 3pm Sunday.

The Sheriff moved additional personnel to the Coastside last night and is engaging in "proactive policing". Deputies have been stationed publicly for emergency contact:

• Montara at 8th Street and state Highway 1
• Moss Beach at California Avenue and Highway 1
• El Granada at Capistrano Street and Highway 1
• Princeton at the Harbor Master’s Office at the Princeton Harbor
• La Honda at the La Honda fire station at state Highway 84 and Entrada Way
• Pescadero at Pescadero Creek Road and Stage Road

People who have cell phones and need emergency assistance should call (650) 363-4911 for police. For fire or ambulance service, people with cell phones can call (650) 363-4961.

Chris Carfi writes:

[The outage includes] two mobile phone networks (SprintPCS and T-Mobile) as well as our Coastside.net DSL.  Local SBC land line service continues to work, but calling outside the local calling area results in a "fast-busy" signal.  Calls within Half Moon Bay are connected normally for the most part, but any attempts to dial 800- or 888- service numbers were resulting in fast-busy signals as well.

Calls to the non-emergency line of the HMB Police Department also have resulted in busy signals for almost 12 hours, until 7:30 this morning.  We stopped by the HMB Police Department office at about 7:30, however the office was closed.  Outside the office is a phone to connect to HMBPD dispatch.  It too was giving a fast-busy signal.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the western snowy plover is still a threatened species. In response to two lawsuits that charged the plover was not a sufficiently distinct species to merit the distinction, the Service ruled that it is markedly separate from other populations and that it meets the requirements for protection as a distinct population segment .

The western population of the tiny shorebird that breeds in coastal areas in California, Oregon and Washington has been listed as threatened since 1993. The current population estimate for the U.S. portion of the Pacific Coast population is approximately 2,300, based on a 2005 survey. The largest number of breeding birds occurs south of San Francisco Bay to southern Baja. It is classified as a "distinct population segment" under the ESA, separate from populations that nest in inland areas from Nevada and Utah to Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

The USFWS says the population has made significant progress toward delisting, and is proposing a new rule that will allow incidental "takings" of plovers in counties that have met their breeding bird management goals.  The goal of the rule is to increase public support for recover of the species.

The Service seeks public comment on the proposed rule for 60 days to the Field Supervisor (Attn: WSP-4d), Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1655 Heindon Road, Arcata, California 95521 or by fax at 707-822-8411. 

Caltrans says they’re getting in inquiries about a boulder on Hwy 92 that one motorist said is "kind of scary looking, like it might not take much for it to fall on the road."

Jeff Weiss at Caltrans asked us to let everyone know that the maintenance department has checked it out and said, "Despite appearances, it’s sitting in a ditch and is very safe. It is not going to tumble onto the road."

I’ve asked Caltrans for a photo of the boulder, just to make certain we’re all talking about the same boulder.