California officials are “racing against time” to fix a pricey stretch of highway that is at risk of falling into the ocean and crippling an entire region.

The cliff-hugging section of U.S. 101, which links Eureka to Crescent City, has had a string of “multimillion-dollar band-aid” fixes throughout the years, including squeezing the highway into one lane. The area has been monitored, and field studies have been conducted. Now, Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) believes the best long-term option would be to build a 6,000-foot tunnel that would bypass the landslide area.

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Parts of the overhang are already crumbling into the Pacific Ocean due to ground tremors and storms dislodging rocks from nearby slopes, sending debris onto the pavement, and prompting complicated closures.

If constructed, the tunnel would be the longest in state history and serve as a vital lifeline carved through bedrock for a relatively isolated region. The problem with such a large infrastructure project is the attached $2.1 billion price tag and timeline, which will take until 2039 to complete.

“We’re really racing against time,” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), who represents a coastal span from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, told the San Francisco Chronicle. The rugged stretch of road is more than five hours north of San Francisco and Portland.

The California Transportation Commission recently got things moving by allocating $40 million as “part of the design phase of the Last Chance Grade Project along U.S. Highway 101 south of Crescent City in Del Norte County.” The money will go toward designing a tunnel to avoid the cliffs at Last Chance Grade, the section most prone to landslides.

The project is now undergoing more environmental reviews as lawmakers try to find funding in a state with a $12 billion deficit.

So far, Caltrans has set $275 million for designing and engineering, with construction set for 2030.

Gregory Burns, a lobbyist with Thorn Run Partners, Del Norte County’s advocate in Washington, D.C., said despite initial funding, “there is a roughly $2.1 billion delta that we’re going to have to deal with” between now and the project’s completion in 2039.

There is some hope that the federal government might get involved and fill the $2 billion gap, which happened in 2013 when federal emergency relief funds paid for twin tunnels at Devil’s Slide near Pacifica.

Huffman, too, is gambling on a federal mega grant for transportation infrastructure. He told the San Francisco Chronicle that he knows there will be challenges ahead, which include getting the plan through several presidential administrations.

The stakes are high. If engineers fail or the funding falls through, the closure would result in a nearly 450-mile detour between Klamath and Crescent City.

Cindy Vosburg, director of the Crescent City Chamber of Commerce, told SFGATE that a February 2021 landslide closed the road for months, “forcing the Klamath community, including schoolchildren, to take an eight-hour detour.”

California is no stranger to massive projects with ballooning budgets.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy terminated $4 billion in federal funding for the California High-Speed Rail Authority just weeks after putting the state’s bullet train project on notice.

“After over a decade of failures, CHSRA’s mismanagement and incompetence has proven it cannot build its train to nowhere on time or on budget,” Duffy said in a statement. “It’s time for this boondoggle to die.”

President Donald Trump praised his administration’s work in terminating the project and said in a Truth Social post that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) was “incompetent.”

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Newsom vowed to fight the “illegal” move by the Trump administration.

The California High Speed Rail Authority, which oversees the project, filed a lawsuit challenging the cancellation as an “arbitrary and capricious” abuse of authority at the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.