HalfMoonBayReview.com
September 12, 2007

“Big Dig” set for Devil’s Slide

By David F. Smydra Jr.

Conventional wisdom indicates that you can't dig through a mountain without the help of a big machine. Also: two machines are better than one.

That’s why this week at the Devil’'s Slide construction site, Caltrans is delivering a couple of 50-foot-long “roadheaders.” The Austrian machines, which together carry a price tag of more than $6 million and suggest immediate comparison to the giant Transformers that thrilled moviegoers this summer, will soon begin blasting two holes through Montara Mountain. The tunnels will empty out on the mountain’s north side, to a bridge that is currently being constructed over Shamrock Valley south of Pacifica.

Thus will begin the next phase of the Devil’s Slide tunnel project. To celebrate the beginning of digging, Caltrans is holding an “Excavation Celebration” at 10 a.m. Monday at the south construction site. Public officials confirmed to attend so far include U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos and county Supervisor Rich Gordon. Caltrans Director Will Kempton will also speak.

The event will mark a major shift in activity on the project. The bridge has been under construction for more than a year, and crews from at least two contractors have been steadily laboring on various elements of the project. A giant retaining wall was built on the mountain’s face to hold back further erosion and make way for the new path of Highway 1. In addition, a 340-foot retaining wall was built below the road, between the highway and the ocean, in order to accommodate a temporary path for traffic during construction.

Once tunnel excavation begins, workers will bore through the rock at full speed, working 24 hours a day, seven days per week. Caltrans spokesman John Cunliffe said that traffic will be impeded less often than it is now, due to much of the construction activity moving to the inside of the tunnel, and operations shifting to the eastern side of the road, between Highway 1 and the mountain. Trucks carrying more than 600,000 cubic yards of excavated rock and dirt from inside the mountain will make more than 30,000 trips to a hillside between the south portal and the future Caltrans operation center. Meanwhile, Highway 1 will temporarily be rerouted closer to the ocean, giving trucks and construction crews plenty of room to maneuver.

For Zoe Kersteen-Tucker, Coastside Land Trust executive director, the tunnel excavation carries with it a huge sense of accomplishment.

“It was never really very real — but now it’s like every week you drive up there, and you see significant progress,” she said. “And you think, ‘Wow, this community did it. We saved a mountain.’ And we get a world-class tunnel in the process.”

Kersteen-Tucker was just one of many Coastside activists who lobbied against the original Caltrans proposal for an overland highway from Montara to Pacifica.

“It was a gigantic dinosaur left over from a bygone freeway area,” Kersteen-Tucker said of the original proposal. “It would have had horrendous visual impacts on this side and the Pacifica side. It would have been a scar on the earth.”

By many accounts the most influential citizen activist and proponent of the Devil’s Slide tunnel was Lennie Roberts, currently a legislative advocate with the Committee for Green Foothills.

“It was sort of like dealing with the Pentagon,” said Roberts, speaking of the original dialogue — or lack thereof — between concerned Coastside residents and the Caltrans of the 1970s and 1980s. Roberts described the bypass proposal as part and parcel of a larger political and regional vision to build out the Coastside into a highly developed coastal area like Daly City, and that Caltrans was initially reluctant to admit that a tunnel was economically or physically possible as part of a safe roadway. Roberts and other organized activists from the Coastside and the Sierra Club used the Freedom of Information Act to start digging into Caltrans’ own internal discussion on the matter, and discovered that some state engineers actually did support a tunnel proposal.

“If the bypass had been built at the time, the coast would have been nothing like we know it today,” Roberts said.

The major turning point, of course, came with the passage of Measure T in November 1996, when 74 percent of San Mateo County voters expressed their preference for a tunnel.

Roberts said this led to a sea change in the way that Caltrans approached the project and engaged the public in future plans.

“The wonderful part is, once the voters approved Measure T in 1996, Caltrans got it, and started working with the county and all the agencies,” she said.

Today Devil’s Slide remains integral to virtually every political, economic, recreational and business issue on the Coastside.

“The Devil’s Slide area has always been a cloud hanging over the coast,” said Gordon. “Will we make it through the winter? Will it be closed down?” The tunnels will presumably bring an end to unexpected and dangerous road closures, Gordon said. “There’s going to be a safe, secure and reliable north-south route for the coast.”

Gordon praised Sen. Barbara Boxer for placing language in federal legislation that designated Devil’s Slide as a “continuing and ongoing federal emergency,” thereby putting it on the track to be paid for entirely by federal dollars.

“That language has been critical. It has been the lynchpin for all the federal funding we’ve been receiving,” Gordon said.

Peter Douglas of the California Coastal Commission — the agency empowered by the Coastal Act to approve all of the design proposals concerning Devil’s Slide — expressed the opinion that it was better late than never.

“When you look at the project as it’s unfolding, it’s long overdue,” Douglas said. “It’s unfortunate that it did take so long, but sometimes that’s what it takes to do the right thing.”

Douglas credits the efforts of Roberts, Kersteen-Tucker and many others who pushed Measure T and the overall tunnel proposal for much of what will be celebrated Monday.

“I really consider the tunnel ... as a tribute to citizen activism in San Mateo County,” Douglas said.

Page last updated September 13, 2007.