BIG SUR, Monterey County — Storms have wreaked hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage to California’s roads and bridges, but nowhere is the problem more obvious than on a stretch of Highway 1 just south of Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, where the last link to the rest of civilization is about to slide down a hillside.

The Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge spans a valley that has exploded with the cracking of falling redwood trees and the crash of rocks as the condemned bridge slides slowly away from the street.

Two weeks ago, local James Wolfenden, 71, was out hiking when he spotted a jagged crack in the bridge’s underbelly. It has since slid downhill several feet — though Caltrans isn’t sure just how much because rain washed its markers away. Its northern end is visibly buckling and sagging like a roller coaster stopped in time.

Winter storms have ravaged the Central Coast, dumping more than 60 inches of rain and eroding areas people have tried to tame. To the north of Big Sur Village, crews are tearing down the doomed bridge. To the south, a landslide has covered parts of Highway 1 with boulders the size of suburban houses. The 435 Big Sur residents and workers who stayed behind have been caught in between, trapped in paradise.

By Thursday evening, PG&E had strung power back through to the village, and residents worked together to arrange food and medicine delivery by air. Some slept in and worked in their gardens, taking advantage of the unexpected vacation.

“There are people who panic and want to leave right away,” said resident Adam House, eating donated chili with his young daughter, Abigail, at the Fernwood Resort north of town, where people who can’t get home are hanging out. “There are other people who say ‘Let’s get the soup going.’ Survival isn’t about a bunch of high-tech gear. It’s about perspective. Now there is no agenda. It’s not so bad.”

For years, the rains didn’t come, locking California in drought. Wildfires scorched huge swathes of land, and farmers searched the skies for clouds. But the storms returned with fury this season, assaulting highways and causing $493 million in road damage — so far — that state officials weren’t prepared to address. The storms have inundated cities from San Diego in the south to Crescent City in the north.

“I’ve never seen a winter season quite like this,” said Susana Cruz, a Caltrans spokeswoman in District Five, which includes Monterey County. “It’s one day at a time for roads across the state. The bridge here (in Big Sur) is beyond repair, and it could take a year to get a new one up. Locals know this is part of living on the coast, and they have been very patient.”

Big Sur, known to tourists as one of the world’s most beautiful meetings of land and water, is largely undeveloped and sparsely populated. The rains — the most the region has seen in 102 years — have crippled the area. Like elsewhere in the state, storms have caused tons of soupy mud and boulders to roll atop highways, ripping out their underpinnings, submerging them and turning small cracks into gaping potholes. The damage will take millions of dollars and many years to fully repair, a Caltrans official said.

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Major damage affecting Bay Area residents includes Highway 37 near Novato, which has flooded so frequently that Caltrans undertook $11.5 million in emergency work in recent weeks to elevate the highway. It reopened early Thursday. Highway 50 in El Dorado County, a popular route to Lake Tahoe, was also closed for several days after rain washed away a hillside beneath. It is now reopened, but with a single lane in each direction — repairs will take months.

Caltrans has identified serious storm damage at 336 sites around the state and has issued 220 emergency contracts to repair it. State-maintained highways, including U.S. highways and interstates, are closed in 40 locations.

In Santa Cruz County, heavy rain washed away 100 feet of Skyline Boulevard. In Marin County, it suctioned the dirt and roadbeds from beneath Highway 1, forcing residents of Muir Beach to take a longer route home. And in Big Sur, it shifted the massive mudslide beneath Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge, cracking it beyond repair. More than 61 miles of Highway 1 are closed in various places, including the 17-mile coastal island that is now Big Sur.

A backlog of highway maintenance, which Gov. Jerry Brown estimated Friday to be around $137 billion, has only made things worse.

“That is something we have to realize,” said U.S. Rep. Jimmy Panetta, D-Carmel Valley, whose district includes Big Sur, of the need to address infrastructure emergencies. He was working to get FEMA to declare an emergency for funding. “We aren’t alone in this state, though it feels like it, with the other emergencies going on.”

“Winter is only halfway over,” said Kirk Gafill by phone, owner of Nepenthe, the famous cliffside restaurant, and president of the Big Sur Chamber of Commerce. He was stuck south of the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge, where his few remaining employees were taking advantage of the closure to scrub the kitchen and repaint the restaurant’s furniture.

“This closure has a very significant impact to the Big Sur business community and the more than 400 people living within the enclave,” he said, adding that some of those stuck have already applied for state unemployment assistance. “The bridge is a game changer, and officials are saying they have never seen a landslide like this.”

Three homes in the village were damaged in the storms last weekend — one beyond recovery. At Deetjens Big Sur Inn, a historic hotel run by a local nonprofit, fallen redwood trees had crushed several buildings. Drooping branches, broken glass, Sheetrock, mud and bubblegum-pink insulation littered the rooms where pillows were still neatly stacked on the queen-sized beds.

On Friday, all roads into Big Sur remained closed. Early in the afternoon, some vans navigated the treacherous 11-foot-wide dirt road near Paul’s Slide to help evacuate residents from the south, including nearly 120 students and staff from the Esalen Institute. The Big Sur Deli, Taphouse and Ripplewood Resort remained open to feed residents.

Potential walking trails in nearby state parks, which some had hoped would bypass the crippled bridge, were ruled too treacherous after the rains. Trekking without permission came with a $5,000 fine. Three huge waterfalls pounded onto the highway near the bridge, and work crews scraped mud and tree trunks off the pavement. Dozens of vehicles remained abandoned near the north end of the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge.

“Obviously it brings you together,” said resident Butch Kronlund. “This place is not easy. Living here is not easy. But it’s worth it. There’s no place else on the planet where you get this combination of us working together to fix the problem.”

The property owners association had received nearly $500,000 in donations to help those most affected by the storms, he said. Some residents were working with a nearby Safeway to have fresh groceries helicoptered in. Children biked on the eerily empty Highway 1 — normally swollen with out-of-state license plates and tourists toting selfie sticks. On Thursday, residents had no electricity and no running water.

Daniel Malloy, 36, cranked out a 410-pin bowling streak on a Wii in the lobby of Fernwood Resort — just north of the doomed bridge. The hotel’s restaurant had remained open intermittently, serving beer to residents by the glow of lanterns on Wednesday night. But when Malloy reported to work at the lodge the next morning, there was no one there except a confused FedEx deliveryman.

“You want people to be able to get down here,” he said, scoring a strike on the TV screen. “This time is already difficult enough because it’s the slow season. You want to be making money. But it’s nice to be open for the community and to not have a lot of outsiders around.”

“You’re going to get awfully sick of those games soon,” another resident said to Malloy, laughing as he went outside.

Lance Gorman, Caltrans’ senior maintenance and damage restoration engineer, said the agency was considering creating a temporary pedestrian bridge, but he couldn’t say when or how it would be built. He also could not say how children in the village would catch their bus when school resumes next week. The village is a half-mile south of the bridge, which was built in 1967.

The agency had begun drilling near the bridge to figure out how to anchor the foundation of a new bridge, he said. By Friday, the bridge had cracked completely, and a line of orange construction cones previously visible in the same sight line had disappeared into the dip.

“We don’t know the geometry of the new bridge yet,” Gorman said Thursday at an online meeting of the Coast Property Owners Association. “It will be a straight bridge. The old bridge was on a curve. We want something between a pedestrian or golf cart-sized bridge. It’s still too early to know if we can get away with it.”

Caltrans hoped to have designs for a temporary bridge within four weeks. There were no plans yet for a new vehicle bridge. As the officials planned, nature’s pull continued.

Down the road, the bridge kept inching away from the cliffside.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Michael Cabanatuan contributed to this report.

Lizzie Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ljohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LizzieJohnsonnn