WILMINGTON — The $22 million dollar project to widen Kerr Avenue has encountered a few obstacles: record summer rainfall, a hurricane, and water and sewer lines that weren’t shown on blueprint plans.
According to North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) engineer and project lead Jason Rivenbark, contractors are running at least a month behind the originally targeted completion date of mid-March 2019.
“We’ve had an unusually wet year,” Rivenbark said. “We cannot pour concrete when it’s raining … Plus, there’s underground utilities we’ve encountered that we did not expect to run into.”
He attributed the unforeseen sewer and water lines to the city’s rapid growth: an apartment complex on Randall Parkway and a nearby housing development, for instance, were not a part of the plans when the project began in January 2016. Because of the new development, he said that utility lines from torn down houses and buildings were left unmapped and unattended.
Addressing residents’ concerns
Rivenbark also addressed several concerns from local residents, issues which have popped up on Facebook forums, comments on news articles, and in emails and calls to Port City Daily.
Rivenbark said that equipment lying idle during working daylight hours is because they are either unnecessary during the current phase of construction or because contractors are mainly working at night to avoid disrupting traffic on traffic-heavy Kerr Avenue and Market Street. In addition, because both are maintained roads and have state restrictions, contractors are usually not allowed to work until after 7 p.m.
For those who thought the median was built than ripped up afterward, he believes this is simply a misunderstanding of the construction process.
“Vehicles were running in the middle part where the existing road was. In order to get the grades and everything right, we paved all the way across the road to get proper drainage. Then we ripped out the center part to build the median,” Rivenbark said.
Crews will take a break during Thanksgiving then begin paving a widened section of Market Street between Westig Road near O’Reilly Autoparts and Jacksonville Street. Once the asphalt is laid on Market Street, Rivenbark said traffic will move to the outside edges of the road to construct median islands. Rivenbark projected the completion of the islands, including one on Kerr Avenue near Food Lion and one near Randall Parkway, to come around the beginning of 2019.
At that point contractors will need to lay the final asphalt surface and complete work on a few of the side streets, including McClelland and Fairlawn Drive.
“I think we’re making headway. It’s slowed down some just from the weather, a hurricane coming in on top of it, but [the crews] are out there working as hard as they can to finish in a timely manner,” Rivenbark said.
Mark Darrough can be reached at [email protected]
