OTTAWA (AFP) — Huge rocks and dirt chuted from a mountainside onto a highway in western Canada overnight, temporarily closing the road to be used to reach several 2010 Winter Olympic venues, police said Wednesday.
"A vehicle was struck by falling rocks," Corporal Dave Ritchie of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told AFP. There were no known injuries, but "we don't know yet if anyone was swept away or buried underneath the rock slide."
"These were very, very large rocks -- the size of a room or semi-trailer truck, about 20 to 30 feet (six to nine meters) in diameter," he said by telephone from the town of Squamish on Canada's Pacific Coast.
"It happened at 11:18 p.m. on Tuesday (0600 GMT Wednesday) on the Sea to Sky highway, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of Vancouver," he said.
The highway and a rail line that hug the mountainous coast from Vancouver to the Whistler ski resort -- where Olympic bobsled, luge, skeleton, alpine skiing, ski jumping and cross country skiing events are to be held -- were closed as a result, he said.
Officials are now looking into either pushing the debris off a cliff into the ocean, if this can be done without any environmental harm, or blasting the fallen rocks and hauling them away.
The road is expected to be reopened in coming days, said Ritchie.
The two-lane highway is undergoing a 600-million-dollar (Canadian, US) widening and straightening for the 2010 Winter Olympics when tens of thousands of athletes and tourists are expected to drive along the picturesque route.
The section now overlaid with boulders is dotted with large rock outcroppings and cliffs that rise from the ocean's edge to high mountain peaks.
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