Back in August 2020, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) evaluated the culvert, found it vulnerable, and put it in a queue for repair, said CDOT spokesperson Elise Thatcher. But Region 3, encompassing northern Colorado, had 100 culverts needing work. The one near Paonia apparently landed too far down on the list.

In what might be termed an oversight, CDOT issued statements to the media labeling the washout a “sinkhole.” According to the United States Geological Survey, however, sinkholes have no entry or exit. They occur when subsurface material caves in, usually during a drought.

The rusty culvert on Highway 133 crumpled on April 29, allowing the usually meek Bear Creek to start excavating the roadway. CDOT was alerted and began monitoring the situation. Meanwhile, drivers continued to use the road until the early morning of May 3, when high water pushed the culvert down the hillside. After that, a 10-foot-wide section of highway collapsed.

Over the next three weeks, high water gouged an ever-deeper streambed through the road.

Other road damage in the area was discovered May 24 when fast runoff washed out the seasonal Kebler Pass Road. The Forest Service said that a paved section near the resort town of Crested Butte was gone.

According to Gunnison County Sheriff Adam Murdie, “Kebler is a bigger washout than Bear Creek and took the whole road out.” Unfortunately, “the ground is saturated by runoff. Gunnison Road and Bridge can’t get equipment to it and have no projected completion date,” said Murdie.

CDOT put the road-rebuilding job near Paonia out for an emergency bid in early May, and Ralph L. Wadsworth Construction, with an office in Frederick, Colorado, was awarded the contract May 16. That’s when the company began engineering work on what will be a temporary bridge, said CDOT’s Thatcher.

Physical construction began Tuesday, May 30, almost a full month after the roadway collapsed. Thatcher said work should be completed well before the end of June.

Judging from comments on social media, many local residents think the state moved far too slowly to fix and reopen the highway.

“They could have dropped in a new culvert and backfilled the roadway with gravel,” said Somerset Water Superintendent John Mlakar. As the Colorado Transportation Department will tell you, however, they have to proceed in a deliberate way.

Townsfolks are saying no one has seen road damage like this since the massive East Muddy Slide of 1986. The mile-wide slide was three-pronged and closed Highway 133 between Paonia and the town of Carbondale for four months.

Repairs progressed slowly as the landslides — which attracted geologists from all over the world — flowed downhill, initially at one foot per hour, then slowing before grinding to a stop 216 days later.

The highway’s temporary repair — as the slide area is still considered active — involved lifting the road up 40 feet and dumping the sliding material into Muddy Creek. That fixed the problem but reduced the capacity of Paonia Reservoir, which sits downstream of the slide. It was meant to hold 20,950 acre-feet, but the reservoir today holds roughly 16,000 acre-feet.

Meanwhile, Paonia, with a population of about 1,500, lacks bustle from visitors to wineries, restaurants, organic farms and shops. Julie Bennett, owner of Root and Vine Market and Qutori Wines on Highway 133, said visitors are down 50%.

A problem for nearby Somerset, population 100, has been sparse but fast-moving traffic. Mlakar said that vans transporting coal miners around the washout to the West Elk Mine were ignoring his town’s 25-mile-per-hour limit, tearing by at 50 mph.

Local law enforcement is problematic, due to the resignation of a Gunnison County deputy. Until a replacement arrives, Delta and Pitkin County sheriff’s departments are helping out.

With road damage blocking two roads in Gunnison County and personnel changes to boot, Sheriff Murdie admitted, “It’s been a heckuva time.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

Correction: Paragraph seven is corrected from a completion date of June 9th to: Unfortunately, “the ground is saturated by runoff. Gunnison Road and Bridge can’t get equipment to it and have no projected completion date,” said Murdie.

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“You gotta see it,” he said of the mine, where miners shear coal from walls 1,800 feet underground. “It’s great – amazing — like a city!”

You can check, but there’s little competition: Until Covid-19 hit, he was the state’s oldest miner still on the job. Light on his feet and compact, he easily looks a decade younger.

The son of Croatian immigrants, Brezonick grew up in the nearby company town of Somerset, Colorado. Perched above a river in a razor-thin valley, the town was isolated from the modern world. With its one tavern and proximity to four active mines, Croatian-English patois filled the carports and garages where the men relaxed after work.

“I grew up listening to the men talk coal. I felt like I knew life underground before I’d set foot in a mine,” Brezonick said. “And over the years I mined with some great guys. That’s what made the work really great.”

Brezonick was only 20 when he first went underground to work alongside his father, Martin, whose dad had also been a coal miner. He loved hearing stories from the 1940s when his father was then a young miner.

“Martin would work all day at the Somerset Mine, owned by Mineral Development Corporation, eat dinner, then go back under to lay explosives he bought himself, with scrip, at the company store.”

Before heavy equipment changed the job, his father worked with a pick and shovel, was paid by the ton, and “all the men had arms like Popeye.” Average pay was about $3 per day.

Instead of going underground right after high school, Gary Brezonick joined the Marines and was sent to Vietnam, where he was one of only three survivors in a 12-man platoon ambushed by North Vietnamese.

“In this life, it’s all about inches,” he says, showing a forehead scar from a bullet that veered off his helmet. Brezonick returned to Colorado with a purple heart, eager to enter the booming coal mines. It was 1971.

By the time he was forced to stop working recently, his job had become high-tech, guiding machinery that set the mine’s steel and concrete roof pillars. Once an area was mined by a multi-million dollar long-wall machine, his crew sealed off the mined areas with mine waste called gob, before moving on to the next section.

Brezonick breathed in a lot of coal and rock dust over the decades, but even though his chest x-ray showed what he called “a big spot” — evidence of black lung — he was denied medical benefits. He said the doctor wanted to know why he was still mining and looked “so healthy.”

Gary Brezonick doesn’t spell out all of his reasons, but unlike his father and grandfather, he kept his son, Matt, from joining him underground.

“Dad drew a line — I wasn’t going be fourth-generation; I wasn’t going underground,” Matt says. “’Get an education’” was the message from his dad.

Gary Brezonick knows he made a tough choice for his son, and in a way it seems contradictory: “It was a thrill for me working underground with my own dad,” he admits. Brezonick rattles off the surnames of some of the men he worked with, and I recognize them from my childhood in the North Fork Valley. He’s naming legends, all multi-generational coal miners.

Brezonick knows that the huge furnaces that burn coal are closing fast. “I don’t think coal will recover and society has turned against it,” he says. As little as 10 years ago, coal still accounted for 50 percent of U.S. electricity production.

But only 22 percent of electricity will come from coal in 2020, reports the Energy Information Agency. Climate-related issues combined with utilities switching to cheap renewables means the business is contracting by 12-15% per year.

Still, Brezonick’s goal is going back underground to run his crew when he turns 70 – and beyond. For now, though, he isn’t talking about that possibility: He’s furious at being laid off, says his son.

Meanwhile, adds Matt with a grin, “My dad has a new job hauling dirt for a contractor in Telluride.” He predicts his dad will be working — and working hard — until his last breath.

David Marston is a contributor to Writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He grew up in Paonia, Colorado,

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