Northbound I-5 reopens south of Bellingham after clearing March 19 landslide, stabilizing slope

(BELLINGHAM)– Both lanes of northbound Interstate 5 reopened Wednesday, April 15, south of Bellingham after a March 19 landslide between milepost 248 and 249 forced them to close.

The Washington State Department of Transportation executed an emergency contract March 21, and crews began working seven days a week stabilizing the slope and clearing debris.

Geotechnical engineers performed a final inspection to confirm the stability of the slope before northbound I-5 lanes reopened, according to WSDOT.

Slope stabilization and clearing
At approximately 9:30 p.m. March 19, a 250-foot-long, 100-foot-tall section of a slope above northbound I-5 sent thousands of cubic yards of boulders, trees and other debris toward nearby lanes of I-5. Boulders, some as big as buses and many others larger than a pickup truck, remained unstable and unsupported.

In the nearly four weeks since the slide, specialized crews rappelled down the slope to inspect it and dislodge loose slabs of rock using hand and air-compression tools. They also drilled 2,065 linear feet of holes into the rock face and anchored 96 steel dowels 15 to 25 feet deep to stabilize the slope.

As they methodically worked their way from the top of the slope down, other crews began to remove about 7,000 cubic yards of debris – enough to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools – from along northbound I-5.

All this work was done under careful supervision of onsite geotechnical engineers, who carefully analyzed the slope as work progressed, searched for potential unstable areas and developed plans to anchor them with steel dowels so northbound I-5 could safely reopen.