When a road collapses in a landslide like Teton Pass in Wyoming, is it even fixable? How are these roads reconstructed?
In: Engineering
There are a few ways to fix the roads after a landslide. If a landslide covers a road you can dig away the material and expose the road underneath. Then repair the damaged surface and open it up for traffic. When a landslide have dug away the soil under the road this can be filled with gravel and a new road be put over top. You might see a combination of this where they remove the material that cover the road and use this to fill inn the areas where there are missing material under the road. In some cases you need to move the road further into the hill in order to get enough material to fill the holes. The extreme case of this involves digging a tunnel for the road which will also be safe against future landslides.
In this case the area that slid was all fill to start with. That is, there was originally a valley, and when they wanted to put a road there, they dumped in a lot of dirt and rock to fill in the valley. Since they filled it once, they can fill it again to repair it.
This time they are likely to add some sort of reinforcement to the fill material as they put the rock and dirt in place. The reinforcement takes different forms — strips, grids, cells — but they are usually all installed in layers as the fill is added layer by layer.
[https://civildigital.com/reinforced-soil-principles-soil-reinforcing-advantages/](https://civildigital.com/reinforced-soil-principles-soil-reinforcing-advantages/)
Remember that these roads were also built at some point. If you have the material and tools available, you can always re-build them as well, should the need arise.
An engineer goes over the issues and potential solutions in this video. https://youtu.be/Yu8ZthFK2OE?si=PIzGqbR0y0yMDmNG
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