Highway 1 reopens ahead of ‘atmospheric river event.’ But it won’t be for long
Highway 1 opened near Big Sur on Tuesday ahead of what the National Weather Service is calling a “bomb cyclone.”
Rock slides closed a stretch of Highway 1 on New Year’s Eve as a rain storm slammed into the Central Coast.
The scenic highway was closed from Ragged Point, located 2.1 miles south of the border between Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties, to 2.5 miles south of Big Sur in Monterey County for a few days.
As of 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, Caltrans had fully reopened that section of Highway 1, agency spokesman Kevin Drabinski said, with one-way reversing traffic control 22 miles north of the county line.
Crews at the Paul’s Slide area were cleaning out debris from a catchment area, he said.
That section of Highway 1 will close again sometime Wednesday, Caltrans said, although the exact closure time hadn’t been established as of 8:30 a.m. Tuesday.
“The one-day reopening of Highway 1 is designed in part to allow for residents and businesses within the closure area to circulate and gather necessary supplies.”
“A severe atmospheric river event is expected to arrive Wednesday,” Drabinski said, and the forecast calls for “additional heavy weather for the upcoming weekend.”
“Given the saturated conditions already in place, there is a strong possibility that the closure of Highway 1 scheduled to go into effect on Wednesday ... could be in place for an extended time,” he said.
The National Weather Service defines a bomb cyclone as an area of dramatically dropping atmospheric pressure, intensifying an incoming storm.
