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 toward the sea. Winter storms have ravaged the Central Coast, dumping more than 60 inches of rain and eroding areas people have tried to tame. To the south, a landslide has covered parts of Highway 1 with boulders the size of suburban houses. 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. “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. [...] 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. 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. 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. 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. Caltrans has identified serious storm damage at 336 sites around the state and has issued 220 emergency contracts to repair it. “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. “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. 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. 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, where food and gasoline for the generator had run out. Three huge waterfalls pounded onto the highway near the bridge, and work crews scraped mud and tree trunks off the pavement. Children biked on the eerily empty Highway 1 — normally swollen with out-of-state license plates and tourists toting selfie sticks. 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. 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.