There is nothing but a 30-foot drop off where the southbound lane of East Bay Drive used to be. At high tide, the waters of Coos Bay lap at the edge of a pile of downed trees, rocks, chunks of asphalt and mud. Signs block the roadway from each direction. But occasionally curious pedestrians walk up to look down at the results of a slide that started during the last week of January. If they look closely, they can see trickles of the saturated ground still sliding down the hillside.

Now residents on the south side of the slide have to drive south to Coos River Road and through Coos Bay to get to North Bend. The closure has been especially inconvenient for residents who drive their children to school, like area resident Karen Crosby.

“We live about two miles south of the slide area, and we usually go north into town but don't anymore now, obviously,” she said. “My daughter's in the North Bend school system and we have to drive her into town every morning.”

ODOT Senior Geotechnical Engineer Pete Castro was at the site Friday, overseeing the work.

“If the county wasn't interested in this road and everybody just left this, it would eventually eat all the way back up the hill,” he said.

Castro said the first step in repairing the slide is to remove all of the debris and loose material.

Much of the dirt, rock and trees had pushed out into the edge of the bay during the slide, providing a place to pile the remaining debris. Workers plan to cut the asphalt back to the center line of the roadway.

Crews use large boulders, between three and five feet, to form a solid base many feet below the road surface. They provided a place for heavy equipment to operate to remove remaining debris and to start building up the repair.

Workers found a solid layer of three- to five-foot boulders several feet below the surface of East Bay. Castro said the boulders were from a previous repair at the same location.

Since East Bay is a county road ODOT usually doesn't work on it, and they have no record of the earlier slide. Castro said some ODOT personnel speculated that East Bay may have been considered part of U.S. Highway 101 before the McCullough Bridge was built in the 1930s, and the old repair could have been made at that time. But record searches back to the '30s showed the road belonging to the county.

Long-time Cooston area resident Frank Rood Sr. said he believes the earlier slide occurred sometime in the late 1950s.

“It was near Christmastime because my wife's brother was in town,” he remembered. “He wasn't impressed with the road system.”

But that old repair is making the current project much easier for the work crews.

“Finding the boulders makes the job faster and cheaper,” Castro said.

An excavator was able to work at the bottom of the slide, rather than trying to remove the material from above. Castro said without the boulders, the excavator would have been buried in the mud.

Work crews will add eight to 10 feet of rock material, less than one foot in size, to re-create the hillside. Trucks dump loads of rock down the hillside, and then a bulldozer pushes the rock into place. The road can be built on this layer.

Main Rock Products Co-owner Sam Main said crews dumped 1,500 tons of rock at the site on Friday. He estimated another 10,000 tons would be needed to complete the job.

Approximately 13 people were working on the repairs at the East Bay Slide. Aside from Castro and the excavator operator, one bulldozer operator, one foreman from Johnson Rock directing the operators, four truck drivers bringing loads of rock to the site and another four Main Rock Products employees loading the trucks at the pit on Kentuck Way were working to rebuild the hillside with rock. The trucks backed up to the edge of the road and dumped tons of rock down into the hole left from the slide.

After a more solid hill is constructed out of rock, the road can be built using layers of gravel and then asphalt.

“I think we'll have eight trucks in here on Monday,” Main said.

If the work continues to go smoothly, the job could be finished ahead of schedule.

Storms coming in over the weekend weren't a major concern for work crews.

“The rain just exacerbates things and slows us down a little,” Castro said.

But the unusually wet winter has escalated problems elsewhere for ODOT and other road crews.

“ODOT has had an unusually high number of slides in January,” Castro said.

He said there were about 50 significant slides, ones that caused road closures, between Dec. 30 and Jan. 31 in Southwestern Oregon. And there were between 75 and 100 less significant slides.

“A lot of people are putting in some long hours,” he said.

With clearer weather forecast for this week, crews may have a chance to catch up.