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I’ve overseen enough BLM-managed infrastructure projects in the last twenty years to know how quickly one miscalculation can throw an entire schedule—and budget—into chaos. But this was one of the closest calls I’ve ever seen.
The site was in eastern Nevada, a rugged high-elevation area with exposed cut slopes and legacy mine roads. We had approved a renewable energy company’s access road improvement project as part of a larger land use permit. Nothing fancy—just some road widening, culvert upgrades, and erosion control along an existing route.
But a few weeks into construction, their field crew reported a sudden drop in the slope above a switchback. It wasn’t massive, maybe a 10-inch vertical separation at first glance. Still, the foreman had enough sense to stop grading work immediately. That one call may have saved lives.
I drove out that same day and confirmed what I suspected: shallow cracking, minor heaving at the base, and signs of soil saturation far above what was typical. I didn’t have the tools to make a slope stability determination on the spot, and I didn’t want to risk guessing.
We called in a geotechnical firm that had worked on nearby reclamation and public safety efforts. Their team arrived within 48 hours and immediately began a thorough landslide hazard assessment. What impressed me was how methodical they were. They didn’t just look at the cracking or settle for surface observations. They initiated a full terrain model using drone photogrammetry and followed it up with ground-based LiDAR scanning.
That combination gave them a highly detailed 3D model of the slope—both current and historical, using archived imagery. From there, they used subsurface borings and cone penetrometer testing to confirm that the entire upper third of the slope was sitting on a layer of weathered tuff and clay that could fail under moderate saturation.
The rain that had caused the separation wasn’t even extreme. It was an average storm. But when those layers get lubricated, even modest shearing can create enough movement to displace the roadbed or worse.
They outlined a two-phase solution that made sense both technically and administratively. First, they designed a stabilization strategy that included removing saturated soil at the top, replacing it with compacted rock fill, and installing horizontal drains to lower the pore water pressure. That part was fast. Their crews handled it within ten days, and our construction timeline barely took a hit.
The second part was longer-term: they created a permanent monitoring plan, installing inclinometers and surface displacement markers that send data to a cloud dashboard. This lets our district track any subtle movement year-round—even through freeze-thaw cycles. The company granted us permanent access, so we can continue tracking it long after the initial project is completed.
This episode changed how I approach slope hazards on BLM land. Before, we only called in consultants if we had a visible failure. Now, any permit application near known unstable geology triggers a consultation. It’s added some cost and time to our process, but it’s a tradeoff I’ll gladly take.
The best part? They helped us write a public safety summary we could share with the energy company’s stakeholders and environmental review team. It turned a potentially alarming situation into a show of diligence and good governance. One of their hydrologists even walked our team through the regional risk zones, helping us flag a few older grazing allotments that may need reevaluation.
There’s something incredibly valuable in working with engineers who don’t just diagnose a problem, but who equip your entire team to manage it with confidence.
When you’re dealing with large tracts of land, incomplete subsurface records, and highly variable terrain, you can’t afford to guess. A strong geotechnical slope analysis may not grab headlines, but it protects people, projects, and reputations.
And in our case, it saved an entire project from what could’ve been a six-figure delay or worse.
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