Half a mile of the heavily traveled Poor House Road between Highway 25 and South Montgomery Street will be closed for construction starting Monday morning while contractors replace the base of the road in preparation for future repaving.
Smithville-based construction company Cook and Son bid almost $375,000 for the project, said District 4 Supervisor Bricklee Miller. Burns Dirt Construction and Phillips Contracting Company, both based in Columbus, bid slightly more but still less than $400,000.
The project is funded by Oktibbeha County road bond money. The road is in Districts 4 and 5, but Miller presented the project to the board of supervisors, and the money was allocated to her district, she said.
Cook and Son has until early November to complete the project, but it is scheduled to be finished within a week of Oct. 19, just in time for the even heavier traffic that comes with Mississippi State University home football games. The Bulldogs’ next two games will be out of town before they play Louisiana State University on Oct. 19.
Construction workers will work eleven-and-a-half hours per day and seven days per week to meet the self-imposed deadline, foreman Dustin Riggan said.
“The only thing that’s going to hold (up) this project is weather, and as far as forecast goes, we’re good,” he said.
The base of the road needs to be replaced because it was made with what Riggan calls high-volume clay, which swells in rainy weather and shrinks in dry weather.
“This flexible asphalt right here can’t take it,” he said. “If the road swells, that’s where you get these cracks. If it shrinks, that’s where you get the dips.”
Workers will dig two feet deep to remove the base and replace it with a foundation Riggan calls “high-grade dirt,” then surface it with three layers of bituminous surface treatment (BST). Roads with BST usually get two layers, but the extra layer will provide reinforcement to make the road smoother and limit the amount of dust generated by traffic, Riggan said.
The six Cook and Son construction workers and the subcontractors applying BST will try to finish 200 feet of road every day or two, he said.
The rest of the road will later receive the same construction, piece by piece, until the entire base has been replaced and the road can be paved.
There will be no detour, but the residents of the houses along the stretch of Poor House Road will still be able to come and go, Riggan said.
West of Old Highway 25, Poor House Road becomes Longview Road, which is also under construction and will be finished by August 2020. The project is also in Miller’s district and will replace culverts and widen the road so it can handle heavy traffic.
“With Longview Road under contract, I am excited to see the next phase of road improvements for the southern side of Oktibbeha County that is seeing tremendous growth and development,” Miller said.
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