Local road crews struggle to keep debris off roads.

It’s Feb. 6, just after 4pm on Palo Colorado Road, and Richard Gorton, a Palo Colorado resident and off-duty Cal Fire firefighter, drives his pickup east up the storm-torn canyon. Along the way, branches, trunks and freshly fallen trees line the steep banks of Palo Colorado Creek.

The canyon is gloomy under a darkening sky, and another wet storm is just hours away. Gorton points out a spot in the creek where silt – and the remains of a ’57-or-so Chevy that came from up the hill – stopped up in a tangle of trunks and drove water and mud up onto the road.

“The ground is at such a saturation point with all that fire damage,” he says, referencing the summer’s Soberanes Fire. “There’s not vegetation to hold everything together.”

When he passes over the saddle by the Mid-Coast Fire Brigade station, he points out a private road to his left and mentions a lot of people on that road lost their homes to the 132,127-acre fire. The area’s burn scar is also sending sediment down the creeks.

Horton parks just before the 3.3-mile mark, where a county public works crew is preparing to remove a temporary bridge over Rocky Creek where January storm runoff caused the road’s culvert to fail.

Crews installed the bridge a week prior. They decided to take it out when the National Weather Service changed their forecast and sent out an flash flood warning around 2:30pm.

Juan Mesa, a construction specialist with county public works, stands next Mid-Coast fire chief Cheryl Goetz as an excavator pulls off one of three steel planks over the creek.

“We want to put it back as soon as possible, that’s the plan,” Mesa says.

“What’s really nice is I’m on conference calls with them to make sure we didn’t shut the road down until all the school kids got home,” Goetz adds.

Gorton, meanwhile, points out two driveways – one where his girlfriend lives – that are now creekfront property, and impassable for cars.

Palo Colorado is certainly not the only place with roads hit hard by this winter’s unrelenting storms. As this story went to print, 14 county roads were closed indefinitely.

Near the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, Kirby Avenue is completely shut down and Elkhorn Road is closed south of the reserve.

“It seems to be high-priority with the county,” says Reserve Manager Dave Feliz, “but realistically, it’s still raining, it’s not getting better and they can’t start until things calm down.”

Feliz says part of the problem in the area is an “incredible” amount of sediment runoff from strawberry farms, which runs over the road, into the reserve and ultimately the wetlands.

“We’re concerned about that,” he says. “Landowners really need to manage their sediment onsite, because now it’s going to cost $1 million [to fix the road] in this particular spot.”

Caltrans reported a fresh slide on Highway 1 in Big Sur Feb. 7 at Cow Cliffs, and existing slides again became active.

“This is just a problematic area,” says Caltrans spokeswoman Susana Cruz, who says crews have backed out of the slide areas until the storm passes. “It’s still very active, and crews will not touch it until it stabilizes.”