Residents of Astoria’s Bond Street awoke to the roar of powerful engines this morning.

A squadron of dump trucks was hauling away some of the debris that has pushed out onto the roadway from the hillside above Bond, which continues its slow downward slide.

Astoria Public Works Director Ken Cook said city workers were being careful not to disturb the mass at the toe of the hill as they removed an eight-foot swath of debris from the road. The removal is intended to create a buffer zone between the slide and residences in its path and it also keeps one lane open that can by used by emergency vehicles if necessary.

City Manager Paul Benoit said cracks have begun appearing on Bond Street, and the city is looking at rerouting a waterline that runs along the street. In addition, Northwest Natural is rerouting some natural gas lines, causing brief gas outages, he said. Two senior geotechnical engineers from the city’s consulting firm, Landslide Technologies, were to arrive this morning to assess the situation.

Bond Street has been closed to regular traffic since Sunday between Third Street on the east and Hume Avenue on the west. Besides the encroaching debris, trees had been leaning precariously over the roadway, threatening to fall on people, passing cars and powerlines. After the road closure, crews under contract to Pacific Power began removing the hazardous trees. Tuesday night, another one toppled onto a line at Hume and Bond and had to be removed, but the line was one of many that had earlier been “de-energized” and the lines rerouted, Jan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Pacific Power, said today.

Meanwhile, the historic landslide above Bond is still on the move.

First Street, between Commercial and Duane streets, has been damaged severely by the continuing earth movement and may never again be usable. Huge fissures began opening up as the street dropped 10 to 12 feet or more since the slide started up again recently. Cook said the street dropped another foot over the last 24 hours.

He said none of the 14 houses in the area above the slide appear to have been damaged. There are no houses on the hillside where the slide is occurring, which is the site of a 1954 landslide and was reactivated in early January after days of heavy rainfall. A temporary gravel access road to the area is under construction and should be finished by Friday, Cook said. It will be used, if needed, to allow emergency vehicles to reach the houses in the vicinity of the slide.