(Photo: KUSA)
COLLBRAN - Gov. John Hickenlooper toured the landslide area near Collbran, Colorado Saturday morning, and says he's never seen anything like it.
"We saw pretty immediately that it was big and we understood how big it was," Hickenlooper said. "But seeing it is always very different than reading about something or seeing something in photographs or video. it' s immense. I wasn't sure my eyes were functioning properly."
Hickenlooper flew over the half-mile wide slide in a Colorado National Guard helicopter. The slide about 11 miles south of Collbran, Colorado, measures about 3 miles long.
'I'll bet if we look it's probably the biggest one [landslide] since mankind has existed in this basin, probably the biggest one in 10,000 years.'
Gov. John Hickenlooper"We were able to fly pretty low, right up the entire slide," he said. "We could see the part where it spilled over all this rock and boulder and just kind of floated over the lip of the drainage like it was the side of a bathtub."
Authorities are studying the site, on a northern face of Colorado's Grand Mesa, to understand what triggered the event. They're also concerned about the potential for additional slides.
"I think we're going to try and study the living daylights out of that and try to mitigate and diminish risks as much as humanly possible."
A memorial service is planned in Collbran Sunday afternoon for three missing after the slide.
The three missing after last Sunday's slide are: Clarence "Clancy" Allen Nichols, Daniel Allen Nichols, and Wesley "Wes" Melvin Hawkins.
Governor Hickenlooper says they're working to get a device that could detect metal under all off the mud and debris. He says it could help them pinpoint the truck the men were believed to be in.
"You look at all that rock and all that mass and realize that our human efforts sometimes are dwarfed by the force and the power of nature," he said.
Video on landslide here at source:
--
__._,_.___
No comments:
Post a Comment