Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 1, 1995 TAG: 9503010084
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KIMBERLY N. MARTIN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Traffic whizzed by at breakneck speed on Interstate 81 - but that was southbound.
Northbound traffic was a different story. A kid on a tricycle could've beaten the crawl of cars and trucks heading toward Salem on Tuesday.
And this time there wasn't an accident to blame. The culprit was a 6-foot-deep sinkhole in the middle of a northbound lane, a mile and a half south of Dixie Caverns.
The good news is: The five-mile stretch of highway from exit 132 to exit 137 that was closed Monday night should reopen this afternoon, said Laura Bullock, a Virginia Department of Transportation spokeswoman.
The bad new is: The Roanoke Valley and much of Southwest Virginia is in karst country.
There have been numerous other sinkholes in the region - including one at the Rockingham-Augusta county line in 1992 and one near a Roanoke Regional Airport runway in 1993 - and there will be more.
Sinkholes occur when water seeps through tiny cracks in the ground's porous limestone and begins to erode the rock bit by bit, until the surface no longer has any support, said Ernst Kastning, a geologist at Radford University.
The result is what happened Monday evening when the pavement gave way.
Unlike the area's other sinkholes, the I-81 sinkhole touched the lives of at least 20,000 drivers Tuesday.
"We've got a mess out here. It's like one big mobile warehouse," said Cpt. Charles Compton of the Virginia State Police.
Traffic began backing up around 6 a.m., and the miles of bottleneck weren't expected to let up until midnight, Compton said.
That was a fate many were unwilling to accept.
People were doing just about anything to find their way out of the state police's carefully orchestrated detour onto U.S. 460/11.
Some tried to make U-turns in the shoulder, while others took their chances trying to cross the highway's muddy median. They wound up even more stuck than they were initially and had to have their cars towed, Compton said.
At the Riverside Quickette just outside Elliston on the detour, Robert Henderson grabbed a map to try and find a way around the traffic jam. Henderson was delivering furniture when he found himself trapped in the sinkhole traffic.
"I knew about the [the sinkhole] when I left this morning, but I never dreamed it would be this bad," he said.
What's bad?
Imagine 20,000 cars and trucks stuck at a red light that turns green only once every five minutes.
The wait to get onto 460/11, according to one truck driver, was 30 minutes. Once on, it took another 30 minutes or more to make it back onto I-81.
That's an hour to travel about five miles.
"It's a continuous flow of traffic. We've had complaints all day from businesses. You can't make turns," said Lt. D.F. Murphy of the Salem Police Department.
That's a fact that residents of the Glenvar Heights subdivision were all too familiar with.
U.S. 460/11 runs in front of the subdivision, and the only way Harold Bowman could get out in all that traffic was by making a right turn toward Christiansburg.
"All my business is in Salem and Roanoke," he said. Unfortunately for Bowman, that's a left turn out of his subdivision.
VDOT said it has done everything it can to ensure there's no repeat performance of Tuesday's traffic pattern.
Construction workers spent the morning digging. But the more they dug, the more soft ground they found. The original hole grew from 6 feet deep to 10 feet before they hit solid ground and could begin filling in the cavern with boulders and cement. They will begin asphalting the road today.
"In my 30 years in construction I've never seen anything like this," said Lloyd Shupe, who was helping repair the hole.
However, he said, about a month ago he saw a smaller version of this sinkhole on the shoulder of I-81 several feet away. It now is patched over.
Kastning said those smaller holes may have been a warning, because sinkholes often occur in clusters.
Scott Hodge, assistant resident engineer with Virginia Department of Transportation, agrees.
"We have had some areas on the shoulders where we have had some settlement problems," Hodge said. "But it's difficult for us to open up those areas and start searching for something, so we continue to patch it up."
So he and other VDOT engineers kept a watchful eye on them and waited for something else to develop.
It did Monday morning. Hodge said VDOT engineers noticed a small fissure forming along the pavement. By evening it had developed into a sizable hole.
Staff writer Todd Jackson contributed to this story.
by CNB