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2008 Mozilla Summit Affected By Rock Slide
An anonymous reader writes "The recently concluded 2008 Mozilla Summit, held in Whistler, Canada, was impacted by a rock slide that cut off the main highway between Whistler and Vancouver, where most attendees planned to depart via airplane. In true open-source fashion, summit attendees collaborated on a solution, opening a Bugzilla bug (severity: "blocker"), posting crash dumps, and proposing solutions, including chartering a flight (which would land first in TRUNK, then BRANCH). Eventually, attendees settled on a workaround which seems to have been successful. For next year's summit, organizers might want to consider a location with more redundancy."
This is actually what I do for a living --assess the stability of rock slopes. Those guys in vests you see going in before anyone else does, that's me. Though I did not work on this particular case and I usually look at larger scale failures in open pit mines.
In all honesty, they've done what they can. There is no way of 100% securing that highway, or frankly any mountainous highway in difficult terrain. The highway is as safe as reasonably achievable and is inherited from the 60's when our understanding of geomaterials was significantly less than what it is now. Would a tunnel in places be better now? Probably. But it comes down to money and what people are willing to pay. Quoted 3-4 billion for a new route and you can be damn sure there would be budget overruns. It's one of those assumed risks for living in an area with high natural hazard risks.
Hey, the big earthquake that is supposed to be hitting Vancouver any day now could happen during the Olympics. Hell, one could hit china. The world isn't a 100% thing as much as we think we can understand it and it's very true in natural rock slopes where you are dealing with limited data (strength, joint network, etc) of a highly variable system (properties can be difficult to impossible to measure, vary wildly, and have an insane amount of scale effects). You can get the intact strength of rock out of UCS/triaxial tests, you can get the shear strength along discontinuities. Extrapolating that to the entire slope for the complex interaction of sliding surfaces (joints, where you have a guess of what's there but you don't know 100% because it's buried), block movement/crushing/aspherity removal, natrual processes (weathering, frost jacking, tree roots, animal burrowing, strain softening, etc) is difficult and not 100%
If you don't want to have to deal with road closures due to the fact you live somewhere gorgeous in the mountains and have to drive on a road where there IS a risk of rock falls --tough, go live in the Prairies.