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Jackson Officials Drill At Landslide's Crest

Rebecca Huntington

Workers are building a temporary path for a drill rig to access a slow-moving landslide threatening homes and businesses in a Wyoming resort town.

Jackson officials say the heavy rig will drill bore holes up to 200 feet deep along the upper crest as they look for ways to counter the slow collapse first noticed April 4.

The samples should tell them about the composition of the formation, the depth of the slide, the water levels and the location of the slide's scarp.

Jackson Fire Chief Willy Watsabaugh gave a tour of the area over the weekend.

"Simultaneous to building this road, we're placing weight down on the toe of the slide right at the intersection," Watsabaugh said. "Hopefully [that will] slow the upper part of this slide. But it stands to reason if you push down here on something that's moving, something is going to come up. So we need to place weight in both places almost simultaneously to hold it all."

The slide has destroyed a house and looms over a cluster of businesses.

A multi-media journalist, Rebecca Huntington is a regular contributor to Wyoming Public Radio. She has reported on a variety of topics ranging from the National Parks, wildlife, environment, health care, education and business. She recently co-wrote the one-hour, high-definition documentary, The Stagecoach Bar: An American Crossroads, which premiered in 2012. She also works at another hub for community interactions, the Teton County Library where she is a Communications and Digital Media Specialist. She reported for daily and weekly newspapers in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Wyoming for more than a decade before becoming a multi-media journalist. She completed a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado in 2002. She has written and produced video news stories for the PBS series This American Land (thisamericanland.org) and for Assignment Earth, broadcast on Yahoo! News and NBC affiliates. In 2009, she traveled to Guatemala to produce a series of videos on sustainable agriculture, tourism and forestry and to Peru to report on the impacts of extractive industries on local communities.
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