Excerpt:
About 2,000 motorists, mostly tourists, were stuck in the area on Saturday night after a section of Highway 1 fell into the ocean. No injuries were reported.
Officials in California on Sunday slowly began guiding drivers past a collapsed section of scenic Highway 1 in the Big Sur area, one day after the damage left about 2,000 motorists stranded overnight.
Officials with the California Department of Transportation urged the public on Sunday to avoid that section of the southbound highway in the Central Coast, and Monterey County issued a disaster declaration. The highway remains closed to the public while crews work on the affected areas, where large chunks of the road fell into the ocean. The agency, known as Caltrans, did not give an estimate of when the highway would fully reopen.
Highway 1, also known as the Pacific Coast Highway, features stretches of rocky cliffs, lush mountains, panoramic beaches and coastal redwood forests.
Officials did not say what led to the collapse, but torrential rain on Saturday battered the area near Rocky Creek Bridge, the site of the damage, which is about 17 miles south of Monterey.
There were no reported injuries from the collapse. Many of those stranded on Saturday were visitors who were driving through the area over the Easter holiday and had to sleep in temporary shelters, said Nicholas Pasculli, a spokesman for Monterey County. Others stayed in local hotels, bed-and-breakfasts and campgrounds, and some slept in their cars, he added.
On Saturday evening at Nepenthe, a famed cliffside restaurant, customers slowly learned the news of the road closure from servers and bartenders, and groans could be heard as families scrambled to find empty rooms to spend the night.
Linda Molinari, a Pilates instructor from Hollister, Calif., and her boyfriend were two of those customers. They were making a day trip to Big Sur for lunch on Saturday and ended up arriving around 4 p.m. After hearing the news about the highway, they decided to head back home. At about 5:15 p.m. they were met with a roadblock and told by the authorities that they would have to turn around.
“We came here just to have lunch and go home, and now it’s like everyone is trapped here,” Ms. Molinari recalled thinking. “All the little hotels and stuff, you could tell everybody was swarming…”
