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60 Jackson Residents Remain Under Evacuation Order From Slow-Moving Landslide

About 60 Jackson residents remain under an evacuation order due to a slow-moving landslide on the lower flank of East Gros Ventre Butte that has buckled pavement, cracked retaining walls and undermined water lines.

Some homes in the Budge Drive Hillside area are not at direct risk from the slide. But the slide has compromised the only road to the homes and broken the main waterline. During a tour of the area today, Jackson Fire Chief Willy Watsabaugh said those problems make it unsafe to reoccupy those homes at this time.

“We do not have the ability to provide public safety,” Watsabaugh said. “We may not be able to get ambulances, fire trucks up here. And foot access is a possibility but we are currently assessing what that would mean and how we would accomplish that.”

Likewise, Acting Police Chief Cole Nethercott pointed out a sinkhole in the access road that has constricted traffic to one lane.

“We can’t really excavate it right now. We don’t want to exacerbate the problem,” Nethercott said. “We’ve obviously got an unsettled area, we don’t want to dig down there, we don’t know. We may make the problem worse.”

For now, the road will remain one lane, and Nethercott says officials are hoping the hole won't get bigger. For updates on the town's response to the slow-moving slide, visit townofjackson.com.

A multi-media journalist, Rebecca Huntington is a regular contributor to Wyoming Public Radio. She has reported on a variety of topics ranging from the National Parks, wildlife, environment, health care, education and business. She recently co-wrote the one-hour, high-definition documentary, The Stagecoach Bar: An American Crossroads, which premiered in 2012. She also works at another hub for community interactions, the Teton County Library where she is a Communications and Digital Media Specialist. She reported for daily and weekly newspapers in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Wyoming for more than a decade before becoming a multi-media journalist. She completed a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado in 2002. She has written and produced video news stories for the PBS series This American Land (thisamericanland.org) and for Assignment Earth, broadcast on Yahoo! News and NBC affiliates. In 2009, she traveled to Guatemala to produce a series of videos on sustainable agriculture, tourism and forestry and to Peru to report on the impacts of extractive industries on local communities.
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