Associated Press
HELENA, Mont. - High water undermined a stretch of a Montana highway, causing it to crumble and sending road crews Saturday to frantically make repairs.
Authorities closed both northbound and southbound lanes of Interstate 15 between Helena and Butte after the high water washed out a culvert running beneath the highway. Separate flooding about 160 miles to the west led water to bubble and pop in a pond that holds an abandoned pulp and paper plant's industrial waste.
Crews were busy trying to fix the highway Saturday after closing it down the day before. Traffic was rerouted around the mountains of the Beaverhead-Deer Lodge National Forest, adding at least 24 miles to the 68-mile trip between the cities.
Western and central Montana streams and rivers are running high because of the rapidly melting mountain snowpack and recent rainfall in the area. The rain, snowmelt and saturated soils have prompted the National Weather Service to issue a flood watch Saturday across a swath of central Montana.
The Clark Fork has displaced families from dozens of homes near Missoula and is now causing flooding farther downstream.
Near Frenchtown, 10 days of Clark Fork flooding has saturated the soil and pushed groundwater through the abandoned Smurfit-Stone Container site and its ponds that hold decades of waste.
