Go look at the time lapse photos–whereas a large percentage of the slump will fill the quarry, there’s another large percentage that is moving in a direction that’s physically impossible to shift south. That’s the part that’s going to end up all over the highway and possibly in the river.
Categorically not true: some Dopers encourage throwing stuff into quarries, as the situation warrants.
no way, I can’t believe people are that stupid. and yet they are!
When it happens, and people playing on top of it are killed, their friends and family who were there, but on the correct side of the crack will be crying about how “We didn’t know! Nobody told us it was going to collapse like that!”
But dang, yeah, looks like half the ridge is going to barrel right through the quarry and the area next to it, over the highway and river and anything nearby.
And after that happens, the rest of the ridge is going to be unstable.
That article compares a controlled blast to those used for road building, not ski-patrol set avalanches. I’m nowhere near knowledgeable enough in this area to know if that’s an apples-to-apples comparison or an apples-to-oranges one.
Part of what they’re talking about is removing the debris; they don’t do that in controlled avalanches. Of course, in those, the ‘debris’ is removed once the spring thaw occurs.
A huge issue is the volume of material we’re looking at–they mention the detonations used in Snoqualmie Pass to widen the road, with about 200K cubic yards per year removed for a total of 1 million cubic yards–estimates of what’s about to fall off Rattlesnake Ridge is four million cubic yards. That’s a whole lot of uncontrolled material skating down, and one hell of a cleanup job. Also, as they mention, just setting the charges alone on an unstable slope like that could have some unforeseen consequences and there’s no way to make it safe.
Also keep in mind that snow is, relatively speaking, very light and relatively easy to bulldoze out of the way. It’s a very different proposition to remove four million cubic yards of dirt and rock, assuming you could even get it to fall the way you want it to.
Nope, they’re just going to have to keep monitoring that mess and hope it doesn’t fall down when there’s much traffic going by, but good luck with that because there aren’t too many roads that go over that ridge.
Something slightly off-topic but that may be of interest (though not relevant as the scale is orders of magnitude larger)
A couple of years ago we stayed in the Otztal Valley in Austria, south of Innsbruck. It was summer and we were walking, cycling etc. A beautiful part of the world.
What we didn’t know was the village we stayed in, Niederthai, was only accessible by driving over the debris field of one of thelargest known landslips.
About 10000 years ago several cubic kms of rock face detached from a mountainside, slid down hundreds of meters and piled up across the valley. Running so high up the other side that the main valley and that on the other side was blocked and huge lakes created. Today when you drive up the debris field to Neiderthai you can see how strange the terrain is, a jumble of rocks and pines quite different for the normal mountainside vegetation.
It was so huge and powerful that the rocks involved were heated to the point of metamorphosis into something called “frictionite” and for many years it was thought that an asteroid impact had caused it.
Once you see it on google maps with the terrain switched on it becomes clear.
The top of the mountain slightly to the west of Kofels broke free and blocked the valley to the south and east. A lake formed where Niederthai now sits and also south of Winklen.
Eventually the lakes drained as streams cut new valleys through the debris.
It was quite something to stand on the top of the Stubenfall waterfall and imagine the whole of the mountainside opposite detaching and flowing down, across and up the other side of the valley.
Just FYI, it’s pronounced YAK-uh-maw, not YAK-uh-muh like I’ve been hearing from national news people.
What a mess. It will impact access to/from that area for a long time.
Just wait until you hear it pronounced, “Ya-KIY-maw.” You’re in for a treat.
I actually heard the famed mispronunciation of “William-ette” on a tv show about floating homes recently. To add insult to injury, they claimed the Multnomah channel is off the Willamette when it’s actually off the Columbia. You’d think they’d check these things first but you’d be wrong.
Heck, I once heard a political fundraiser on TV that pronounced the state flower of Colorada as the cuh-LUM-bine, not the COL-um-bine.
In a similar vein, this thread in GQ is discussing the Bonneville Slide, just a 150 miles downstream from Yakima. It was a slide of 14 square km that covered and dammed the entire Columbia river - not just a measly interstate highway.
So ‘ya-KEE-mah’ is completely wrong?
The entire time growing up it was YAK-ah-maw.
Last summer visiting the area I heard a weatherman pronounce it ya-KEE-mah or some such. 
When I was growing up it was always the city of YAK-em-aw and the reservation was where the YAK-uh-maw people lived.
ya-KIE-muh yuh-KAY-muh?:rolleyes::smack:
Looking at the Google Earth image of this location, taken 5/28/17 , does anyone else see a faint line that seems to match up with the top of the breakaway area? If so, this started at least 8 months ago. The location I used was 46°31’34.42" N 120°27’58.37" W, eye alt 2360 ft. Look between the northern quarry roads and the sharp right turn in the road about that, there is a slightly darker line running approx N/S.
My boss put it this way - it rhymes with “Damn it, Janet.”
Yeah, if that is the crack, it isn’t going toward the quarry, but to the northwest, filling in “Union Gap” and creating a bit of a dam on the river there (and burying the highway).
I thought that was the crack, too, but now I’ve decided it is a ridge of basalt protruding from the soil. This area (indeed, most of eastern Washington) was inundated over and over again by lava from ancient volcanic activity. You can see outcrops of it all over the place. In other areas, there are canyons or coulees carved into the basalt hundreds of feet deep.
In between the layers of basalt here on Rattlesnake Ridge are layers of silt and dirt. This is what’s causing the slippage. From what I’ve heard, it was first spotted back in October.