Highway officials hope to have a time and cost estimate within the next week for the work that is needed to repair the section of U.S. 441 that was destroyed in a landslide last week.

The Park service chief of facility management, Charles Sellars declared. “It is a significant slide.  It’s going to take us a significant amount of time to repair it.”

Engineers have yet to determine the most effective way to stabilize the area and repair the road itself. Unstable soil will have to be removed and the resulting ravine from the slide will need to be refilled with soil and rock.

The roadway over the Great Smoky Mountains which connects Cherokee, NC and Gatlinburg, TN has an estimated 2.2 million visitors per year. It should particularly affect the economy of Cherokee. Several local business operators say they’ve already noticed fewer customers. The road is barricaded at Smokemont Campround on the North Carolina and officials say the road past the barricade is closed to any sort of traffic, including hikers, because of the of possibility of unstability around the slide area.