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For over one year, Midwest Rockfall had the unique opportunity to work with the Colorado Department of Transportation constructing and testing various Rockfall systems and designs located at a site in Idaho Springs CO, Georgetown CO, and Dumont, CO. This experience gave us exclusive expertise on the performance and capabilities of a variety of Rockfall Mitigation systems.  

In July of 2010 the BNSF Railroad had a monumental landslide occur the buried a large portion of their railroad track in a remote part of Montana. The steep slope above the incident was determined to be unstable and required rock scaling and stabilization methods before allowing commuter and freight trains to use the route. Midwest Rockfall was called in on an emergency call to scale and stabilize the slope quickly and efficiently since millions of dollars per day were being lost by having this main rail artery nonfunctional.  MWR used winch-operated slushers and hand scaling to clear the landslide area. Wagon drills for difficult access installed rock bolts and used a mix on-site shotcrete, due to its remote location, to construct a buttress provided the solutions to reopen the rail line safely and expeditiously.

Georgetown Hill on I-70 presented an immense challenge to the Colorado Department of Transportion from its dangerous one-mile stretch with unstable slopes that were in excess of 3,000 feet. MWR performed four separate contracts amounting to over 1 million dollars each to provide various solutions and rockfall mitigation methods. Due to its extreme height, helicopters were routinely used to place high capacity rockfall fences and large cable nets on the slope up to two thousand feet above the interstate highway.

On an international level, MWR has completed projects outside the continental United States. One of these projects was Mustique Island and is located 150 miles off the coast of South America. This unique project took the coordination of project members from four different countries. The engineer was located in London, the material manufacturer from Italy, a general contractor from Barbados, and MWR being the contractor from the United States. This project was executed seamlessly and without issue through the competent management personnel and open communication of all involved. Logistic challenges such as shipping materials, equipment, tools, and supplies were accomplished without delay to the project to provide the owner with services that exceeded expectations.

One of MWR’s largest project was for the Washington Department of Transportation. This 6.2 Million dollar project presented many challenges. First of which was the need to perform scaling operations on slopes over 200 feet high without stopping traffic. This was accomplished by constructing portable rockfall fences located along the highway with crane-supported cable nets as a redundancy to the system. 5,600 hours of rock scaling was performed while using this system without incident. The project was located in an area that had adverse weather conditions with heavy rains in the summer and significant snowfall in the winter. Rock bolts and wire mesh were installed using a variety of methods, including wagon drills, cranes, and rope access. The project was completed on time and within budget to the satisfaction of both MWR and the Washington Department of Transportation.