Road construction projects to know about in 2015

Anyone in Great Falls who has had to take a detour to avoid the barricades on River Drive will realize that road construction season in Montana has begun.

That undertaking should more accurately be described as a city infrastructure project. River Drive will remain closed between the Great Falls Tribune and Applebee’s for another two weeks as crews work to replace a water main running between Broadwater Bay Park and Oddfellows Park. But the street’s still closed, leading people to wonder what other road projects are lined up for the coming warm weather months.

With more than 11,000 miles of pavement to maintain, the Montana Department of Transportation needs to cram in as much construction as possible between April and December to keep traffic flowing. Motorists should plan a few extra minutes of road time for the following major projects in north-central Montana.

Interstate 15 south of Wolf Creek Canyon

Up to 30 minute delays between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. intermittently throughout the summer

The most dramatic and potentially disruptive road construction project in the Great Falls District goes by an unassuming name. The D3 Rock Fall Mitigation project has not been let out for bids yet, but at an anticipated cost of $8 million to $10 million, it’s one of the big-money, highly specialized projects of the summer.

“That’s the big one,” said Steve Prinzing, pre-construction engineer for MDT’s Great Falls District. “We’re actually going to be stopping traffic on the interstate on that one — which is really unusual.”

Only four miles in distance, the D3 Rock Fall Mitigation project is the first portion of a five-phase project aimed at eliminating a very real threat of rock crashing down onto the interstate.

“There’s a lot of fractured stuff up there on the canyon walls,” Prinzing said. “Especially adjacent to the northbound lane as you come into the canyon. The rock is actually dipped toward the highway on top of it, and there’s a lot of fracturing. There’s a lot of loose stuff up there, and a lot of potential for stuff to come down — and it’s going to come down right in the middle of the road.”

“We’d rather knock the big stuff down on our terms, rather than let it happen in the middle of a Saturday afternoon,” added Dave Hand, district administrator for the Great Falls District.

The narrow width of the canyon and a lack of any feasible detour routes means that interstate traffic between Great Falls and Helena will be impacted.

“The contractor will be allowed to stop traffic for up to 20 minutes,” Hand said. “Once that 20-minute time-frame is up, if there’s stuff on the road, that’s going to have to be cleaned up — so that will be a little additional time — plus the time necessary just to allow traffic to clear. So if you’re the last guy who stops in the line, by the time you come out it could be 30 minutes.”

“We’re doing rock bolting, rock impact attenuator fence, rock drape mesh, and a huge amount of (cliff face) scaling where guys on ropes with big bars actually get up on the rock slopes and start prying all the loose stuff free,” he said. “Most of this the lanes will be separated by a ‘Jersey barrier.’ We’re going to kick traffic over — two lanes on one side — away from the work. But there’s certain parts of the operation where you just cannot take the risk of having traffic move through there while they’re rolling the big rocks down the hill.”

U.S. Highway 89 east of Browning

Flaggers and up to 30 minute delays throughout most of the construction season

One of Montana’s most scenic stretches of highway is scheduled to get a major upgrade over the next several years, beginning with the Browning-West project. A 5.8-mile reconstruction of Highway 89, starting with the installation of a roundabout at the Highway 2 intersection is about to get underway. The $11.03 million project is just the first step in a multiphase plan to reconstruct a major portion of one of the main travel routes leading into Glacier National Park.

“We’re actually in the process of working on that corridor all the way from Browning to Hudson Bay Divide (south of St. Mary),” Hand said. “They’re actively working on the design and development process for about a 25-mile section of that corridor.”

Built in the 1930s, the highway heading to Glacier winds through the foothills of the Rocky Mountain Front. It’s a beautiful drive but can be dangerous.

“It’s got a very narrow top width and really steep side slopes, so when there is an accident and somebody runs off the road, it’s pretty severe,” Prinzing said. “When the project is completed, we’ll have really good width, good side slopes, it will be a lot more forgiving and we’ll actually have a 6-foot-wide shoulder on the whole thing for bicycles.”

The entire Highway 89 project there should be completed in the next five or six years, depending upon funding.

Motorists looking to bypass this year’s construction phase should consider taking the Starr School Road, or head north on State Route 464, which reconnects with Highway 89 just north of Babb.

U.S. Highway 89 between Bynum and Dupuyer

Flaggers and up to 20 minute delays through the end of August

Two phases of construction on the winding road south from Dupuyer to Choteau have already been completed. A third phase, Pendroy North and South, is underway right now.

“The worst parts of the road were from about Dupuyer to just south of Pendroy,” Prinzing said of the multiyear project now in phase three. “With the Pendroy North and South project, we’re taking care of the worst of the worst.”

“This is another road that was built in the 1930s,” he added. “Most of them were built in what we call ‘side barrow jobs,’ where basically they pulled the dirt from the adjacent area and built the road up. That’s why you have the very steep side slopes and narrow top. Most of them were probably dirt or gravel roads to start with and they just kept improving them. They tried to make it better with what they had.”

Highway 89 was built when cars were slower and there weren’t as many of them. It’s fundamental design is now seriously outdated.

“We had 25- to 30-mile-per-hour curves on this road,” Prinzing said of 89, “and a fairly high accident severity rate.”

That hazard is close to being corrected. Crews are already in progress on the $6.90 million project. Five miles of roadway should be reconstructed by the end of summer.

U.S. Highway 87 east of Great Falls

Traffic reduced to one lane. Flaggers and 15- to 20-minute delays.

Motorist barely noticed last year when a four-mile stretch of Highway 87 east of Great Falls was realigned and completely rebuilt at the outer edge of the existing roadway. A willing property owner had agreed to a property exchange, allowing MDT to construct the new highway at a parallel location and limit traffic interruptions. That’s not going to be an option during the current Belt North and Belt South phases of the project.

“There are going to be delays,” Hand said of what motorists can expect driving east of Great Falls.

“This will be a continuation of the five-lane section that got built previously,” Prinzing said of the ongoing project. “It will extend all the way to the junction with county road 331 on top of Belt Hill.”

Schellinger Construction Company is trying to limit traffic disruptions as much as possible by completing base work on the side of the highway first, but will soon tear into the existing roadway.

The $8.20 million project should be finished before the end of August — leading into a final phase in 2016 when construction crews will pick up at the bottom of Belt Hill and expand the highway all the way to Armington Junction.

“We’re not dealing with Belt Hill, even with phase three,” Prinzing explained of next year’s phase three. “That hill is too expensive to really deal with, and it’s not really necessary from a traffic standpoint or even a safety standpoint to have a downhill passing lane.”

U.S. Highway 87 between Box Elder and Havre

Single-lane traffic with occasional delays of up to 20-minutes until the end of August

The longest stretch of roadway scheduled for a “do-over” this year is Highway 87 between Box Elder and Havre. Roughly 22 miles of roadway there will be ground up and relayed during the summer-long Box Elder-North construction project. The project was bid out at $7.88 million.

“The road’s in really poor condition,” Prinzing said of the route north to U.S. Highway 2. “It’s basically a complete resurfacing. It’s a fairly deep ‘cold in-place recycle’ where they grind up the existing asphalt down fairly deep, put a rejuvenater in it and basically re-lay that — then put brand new hot-mix asphalt material over the top of that.”

The exact starting date of the project has yet to be determined.

State Highway 66north of Hays

Possible brief delays at one construction site, plus a short detour through the town of Hays

If you’ve driven that lonely stretch of highway running straight south from the Hi-Line toward Billings anytime recently, you’ll know that bridge work has been going on there since last fall. Three bridges are being replaced on State Highway 66 near Hays, requiring a detour through the small reservation community to get back to the main road running north and south.

“Last time I went through one was done and they were kind of in-the-middle of the other and hadn’t started the other one yet,” Prinzing said of the multi-bridge project over the winding course of Little Peoples Creek. “They must be getting close by now.”

“There’s not too much on delays for that one,” he added. “The bridge to the north had no good detour route so we built a low-speed gravel detour around it. The detour through Hays around two of the bridges is short - only a couple miles long.”

The $2.88 million project should be completed before the middle of August.