Rivers can be fickle things. We have many sections of highway that wind through river valleys, and every now and then the river will change course and attack the road. It will chew into the bank and steadily undermine it. The first sign of a problem is often cracking opening up in the seal. We can often buy time by filling them and the river will oblige us by reverting to it's normal course.
We have been keeping an eye on one problem area for about a month. It looked like it had settled down, but today I noticed it had moved a bit, and as I watched a new crack opened up. Time to hit the panic button. We like to get off the road early on a friday, and making a deviation and barricading off a washout wasn't in the plan. This afternoon we managed to constuct a deviation on the inland side of the road in about 3 hours, digging out the area with an excavator, and carting in a pile of metal.

Traffic will be diverted around the slumped area, onto the levelled area in front of the loader. We will use cones and signs to do this and then start work on the slump itself, probably by using big boulders, and building up the river bank. But that can now wait till next week.

Rest Area 300m