Landslide shuts U.S. Highway 101 on north Oregon coast
ROCKAWAY BEACH, Ore. (KTVZ) — An active landslide has closed a stretch of U.S. Highway 101 in both directions Tuesday along the northern Oregon coast at milepost 47, north of Rockaway Beach, according to tweets from the Oregon Department of Transportation.
ODOT tweeted a photo Tuesday morning showing a large chunk of muddy and rocky hillside partially collapsed onto the highway.
The closure will last through at least Tuesday night, ODOT said. Traffic is being rerouted using Miami-Foley Road, which connects to 101 via Highway 53 near Nehalem and reconnects in Garibaldi, KGW reported.
The route is length-restricted, ODOT said, so longer trucks will need to use alternate routes.
It's unclear when the landslide began. The timestamp for the entry on ODOT's Trip Check website indicated it was posted no later than 6:33 a.m.
An emergency alert from the Neah-Kah-Nie School District at about 7:15 a.m. said that school buses would be running late due to a rock slide on Highway 101 at the Jetty Fishery, which is in the same stretch of highway that ODOT marked as closed, and advised parents to use the Miami-Foley Road route.
Northwest Oregon and Western Washington have seen heavy rainfall on several days over the last two weeks, prompting to the National Weather Service to issue flood watch notices for parts of the states, although as of Tuesday morning there were no flood watch alerts in place for Oregon.
