FAIRLEE — A roughly one-mile stretch of Route 5 in Fairlee will remain closed for at least a couple of weeks because rocks are continuing to fall off the face of a ledge where a rockslide occurred on Tuesday afternoon.

“There’s at least two that we think have a pretty high chance of coming down because there’s new tension cracks” in the rock face, which are making the rocks unstable, Jeremy Reed, highway division director and chief engineer for the Vermont Agency of Transportation, said in a Friday afternoon phone interview.

Since the rockslide on Tuesday, VTrans officials have assessed the damage using drones and started putting together a plan for stabilizing the roughly 300-foot ledge in an area known as “The Ledges” where the rockslide originated, Reed said.

“This won’t be as extensive as the I-91 closure which is probably a relief to folks,” Reed said, citing a multi-year rock stabilization project on Interstate 91 South between Fairlee and Bradford, Vt., which, at times, caused traffic to be rerouted onto Route 5. I-91 South was closed intermittently for weeks at time during the years-long project.

With the current Route 5 closure, “I think we’re talking at most weeks, not months,” Reed said, but cautioned that VTrans officials are still early on in the planning process.

The closure, between Sawyer Mountain Drive and Mountain Road in Fairlee just south of the Bradford, Vt., town line, hasn’t been that much of an inconvenience so far for Will Gladstone, who owns Newmont Farm, a dairy farm based in Fairlee on the Bradford, Vt., town line.

“If the road stays closed for a duration, we do have a bunch of acreage in Fairlee and Thetford that is going to make it much more inconvenient to access it,” Gladstone said in a Friday afternoon phone interview. The farm is about three weeks away from beginning to spread manure on the fields to prepare them to be planted.

Gladstone has two children who attend Rivendell Academy in Orford who take the bus.

“It definitely takes a little more time to go get them,” he said about taking his kids to school.

Rivendell Interstate School District Superintendent Randy Gawel said there are two homes and three students whose bus route has been affected by the closure of Route 5 due to the rockslide. Since Tuesday, those families have been providing their children with transportation to and from school. The detour, which Gawel estimated takes an additional 10 to 15 minutes, includes getting on Interstate-91 in Bradford or taking Route 10 through Piermont to Bridge Street and crossing the Connecticut River to Route 5 in Fairlee.

Plans are in the works “to hopefully have a van up and running no later than Tuesday,” to serve those families, Gawel said.

Fairlee Police Chief Wayne Briggs said emergency service response times have been delayed by a couple of minutes because vehicles need to use the interstate instead to get to locations north of where Route 5 is closed.

“We know it’s an inconvenience for everybody, but we want to thank everybody in advance for their patience and understanding,” Briggs said in a Friday morning phone interview. “Safety first.”

VTrans has not yet sent a crew onto the ledge because it is too dangerous to do so at this time, Reed said. That has limited the agency’s ability to survey the area and “get a sense of the size and magnitude for what’s up there,” he said.

Officials are working to develop a model for the trajectory rocks that fall could take and where they could land on the ground. Once they have that model, they can come up with a mitigation plan, including temporary and longer term solutions.

“We won’t open the road until we’re confident the risk has been mitigated,” Reed said.

Such slides are not unusual in the spring when during the freeze-thaw cycle water seeps into the rocks during the day and expands when it turns into ice at night causing cracks to widen, leading to instability, Reed said.

There were about five rockslides throughout the state Tuesday and the one in Fairlee was the most extensive, Reed said. Rocks damaged trees on the slope before hitting the roadway.

“It almost looked like an avalanche came down through there,” he said.

VTrans is considering a number of options to address the unstable rock ledge, Reed said. Any repairs will be covered by state and federal funds — not Fairlee town tax dollars.

As a temporary solution, workers may install a barrier using netting, fencing or even shipping containers to prevent rocks from hitting the roadway “that gives us confidence so we can open up (Route) 5 and then come back later in the summer so we can perform a more permanent fix,” he said.

While there is already a fence that VTrans installed in the 1990s along some parts of The Ledges it does not extend to the area where the rockslide took place, Reed said.

A longer term solution could “be anything from putting rock anchors in to pin the existing rock to the face,” to sending workers up the ledge to pry off loose rocks that have a danger of falling, Reed said.