King County Road Services closed NE Novelty Hill Road July 6 to strengthen the road after this Feb. 2020 slide. @wsdot_traffic @RedmondTraffic @CityOfRedmond @CityofDuvall 
Behind the barrier, specialty crews from GeoStabilization International, experts in difficult slide repairs, are hard at work.
The work zone is unusual. Heavy machinery sits on the edge of the road to extend a small platform. Crews rig up the massive drill to bore holes into the soil under the road. One worker operates the drill from the cab, another tracks progress from the platform.
It’s very, very loud and sounds like an old rickety roller coaster car heading up that last steep hill – tick, tick, tick- before it turns the corner for the plunge.
Jeff Wilcox is the King County Road Services Engineer on site. He stands next to the 9-foot-long steel nails. These are the key to the entire operation.
The nails go into the soil at an angle. The nails use the weight of the road & the traffic to transfer that weight to huge steel plates (“facing”) against the road. The contractor called the soil nails “steel noodles”. (We needed a diagram, too!)
The team tests many, many, many small batches of grout mixture to make sure viscosity is just right. They shoot grout around the noodles inside the soil to maximize strength.
Between now and July 24 when the road reopens, they’ll affix a steel plate to the noodles and the noodles will transfer the weight of the road to the steel plate which holds the slide in place. #infrastructureiscool #mathisimportant #TYengineers @CityofDuvall
