A roughly 25-ft section of the popular Cliff Walk pedestrian path in Newport, R.I., broke off and fell into Easton Bay on March 3, according to Bill Riccio, director of public services for the City of Newport.

The walkwayattracts nearly 3 million visitors annually欣赏该镇许多镀金时代豪宅的海滨景色。

City of Newport Fire Department public services crews responded to the collapse just before 3 p.m. after receiving a call from a person on the Cliff Walk, according to Newport Fire Department Deputy Chief Michael Ferreira. “They secured the scene and called in the state police with a K9 unit to search the collapse to see if there was anyone potentially stuck in the collapsed debris,” he says. “There were no injuries and there was no loss of life,” he says.

纽波特市发言人汤姆·舍夫林（Tom Shevlin）说：“墙壁被称为ocher悬崖的墙壁沿着密集的页岩材料建造，在潮汐低潮时以50到55英尺的垂直下降。”他说：“悬崖区崩溃是一个更自然的特征，部分植被和基本海堤。”似乎失败是滑坡。他说：“我们不认为失败起源于步行的顶端。”他说，悬崖区容易侵蚀天然洞穴和一些空隙。

Shevlin说：“我们目前正在与该州合作，为全面的工程评估提供了一条途径，并就维修的外观提出了建议。”“现在预测何时开始维修还为时过早；我们可以期望在接下来的几天内在该网站周围进一步侵蚀。”他说。该地区完全密封，他预测“步行的10到15英尺可能会崩溃”。

Riccio说，3月10日的视觉检查没有进一步的侵蚀或崩溃。

The city conducted its last extensive engineering assessment of the Cliff Walk area in 2014, after Superstorm Sandy. The work totaling $5.4 million took two and a half years to complete and until the Cliff Walk was reopened. The portion that collapsed was not among the areas identified as needing improvements,Shevlin says。“The Cliff Walk has been closed many times before."

“We are taking a very methodical approach toward developing a solution,”里奇奥说。Since the incident, the small portion of the Cliff Walk that was affected has been closed and a detour has been set up.

The Cliff Walk is not owned by the city, Shevlin says. More than 40 public and private entities own portions of the Cliff Walk, including public streets that the city owns and maintains; to private property that the Cliff Walk traverses via easements, he explains.

In the past “repairs have typically stemmed from coastal events, hurricanes, severe winter storms,” says Shevlin. For this repair Shevlin says the city had been considering federal funding, looking at “a provision for emergency relief available through Federal Highway Administration Emergency Relief (FWHA) funding that would include repairs made because of either a natural disaster or for a wide area or a catastrophic failure.”

但是，罗德岛州运输部的发言人说，该机构于3月9日询问了FWHA的维修资金，并被拒绝。他们指出，纽波特市和悬崖步行项目都没有资格获得资金，因为州长或总统没有根据此类资金的要求发布灾难。

“我们将继续与州和联邦partners to locate all possible opportunities for funding assistance for this treasured tourist destination within the state of Rhode Island,” Riccio says.

“The good news about this repair is that it is a relatively small section that will be closed, but it will be relatively challenging because it’s an area with elevation that we have only dealt with a handful of times before,” he says.

Any repair work would also need to be approved by the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council, which assures that work is sensitive to the Native American environment, Shevlin says.