Highway 24 To Reopen Friday Evening
LEADVILLE, Colo. (CBS4) - Highway 24 over Tennessee Pass is expected to be completely reopened Friday evening for the first time since a sinkhole shut it down.
The 100-foot deep hole formed over an abandoned railroad tunnel on July 9. That meant a long detour for people trying to get between Leadville and Minturn.
Just a few weeks ago, there was nothing to stop the hole from expanding. It's a chimney coming up from a 19th century railroad tunnel.
"As we were in here working we lost asphalt all the way to the center line of the road," Colorado Department of Transportation Project Engineer Matt Figgs said last month. "It had been growing two or three feet every day."
After stabilizing the hole, crews started filling it in with 1,000 cubic yards of flowable fill, similar to cement.
"Those cement trucks, the big mixer trucks that you see, it would basically be 100 of those to fill in that flow-fill," Figgs said.
Now crews are drilling into the earth and filling the area with a kind of grout.
"Ten-thousand years from now, when the road, when the dirt washes out underneath, we'll still have a road because all the grout columns."
There's still a concern because the railroad tunnel crosses Highway 24 two more times on the other side of Tennessee Pass.
While two bicycle races have not been able to go past the highway, it will open ahead of when the USA Pro Cycling Challenge is set to crest Tennessee Pass.
