MONTPELIER, Vt. – A massive rock slide dumped car-sized boulders and several trees across a major downtown road late Monday afternoon, forcing the evacuation of some 50 residents from an apartment house across the street from the slide.
“There was a loud noise – I thought it was a plow coming through – then a flash of light and then the big stuff started coming down,” said Howard Curtis, who lives just north of the slide.
The first slide, roughly at 4:15 p.m., brought down power lines along the street and spread huge stones and several tall trees across the road.
“It was quite a flash of white when those lines came down,” said Curtis.
Slides continued for roughly two hours.
The rocks, trees and dirt fell some 60 feet from cliffs just below the aptly named Cliff Street that climbs high above the city. They filled the middle of a block of Elm Street, which is part of Vermont Route 12 as it heads north out of Montpelier.
Police and fire officials evacuated some 50 residents of the North Branch Apartments, which sits on Elm Street across from the cliffs. Some of the trees and debris spread right up to the doors of the apartment buildings.
The residents, some of whom are handicapped, were taken by buses to the high school where the Red Cross helped to find them places to stay.
Police Chief Douglas Hoyt said around 7 p.m. the residents had been evacuated safely and that there were no injuries.
Stephen Gray, Montpelier’s public works director, said the slide was probably caused by the recent swing of temperature and the rains of Sunday night. “We’ve had freeze and thaw, and then it probably froze again,” he said.
This is the site of a similar slide in 1998. That slide prompted the condemnation of a home below the cliff and closed the section of road for several months while workers removed much of the loose rock.
Gray said he was uncertain how long the section of road – between School Street and Spring Street – will be closed and the residents kept from their apartments.
“We won’t know until we assess what’s up there,” he said.
Evan Shper, 16, said he was walking south on Elm Street toward the center of the city when “a piece of rock” fell off the cliff. He said a few more pieces then fell into the road and tumbled over a retaining wall built after the 1998 slide.
“I stood there for about five seconds,” he said. “Then we heard a huge sound, a huge part was coming down with a tree on it. I started running – I was thinking I want to get out of there as fast as I can.”
Shper dialed 911 on his cell phone. “I am not sure they 100 percent believed me at first,” he said, adding that police and fire officials arrived within minutes.
Hoyt said that emergency workers helped to evacuate homes on Cliff Street because of uncertainty over how much of the cliff would collapse, but he said the residents were allowed to return within a few hours.
The emergency workers also evacuated the apartment houses; some of the residents were brought out in their wheelchairs even as debris tumbled off the cliff into the street near them.
The apartment buildings back up against the North Branch river. A fire truck parked on the other side of the river, with its ladder extended to shine a bright light on the cliff so that emergency workers could watch for the continued slides.
The estimates on the size of the boulders that crashed to the road varied, with Gray guessing some were 15-20 cubic yards and another guessing some could weigh as much as 20-30 tons.
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