One week ahead of schedule

A few thousand drivers will be happy to hear that State Route 141 is open for traffic again.

The road was closed on May 30 to repair a culvert bridge about four miles out from Ironton in front of the Sugar Creek Christian Academy. The bridge was narrow, outdated and had unsafe concrete sidewalls. 

On average, 5,000 vehicles travel on the road at the site each day

It was supposed to take about a month to complete the work, but if it opened up to traffic seven days early.

Kathleen Fuller, a spokesperson for Ohio Department of Transportation’s District 9, said that contractors finishd up road striping and a guardrail on Thursday.

Fuller said the project was scheduled to take about 30 days to complete but is opening up a week early.

“We had some dry weather, which has been really good that we have had rain days,” she said. “It was a 30-day closure, but we always ask the contractor to expedite if they can. The contractors worked hard and our inspectors were out there and they didn’t have any construction issues. It was pretty straight forward.”

The project was to replace a culvert pipe under a small bridge on Ohio 141.

It’s a very narrow culvert so the road had to be closed because there was nowhere to redirect the traffic on either side of the road.

There was also the issue of the abutments of the bridge, the alignment of the road and the stream channel all contributing to the closing of the road.

“So we were forced into the situation of closing it,” Fuller said, adding that design engineers tried to find a way to keep the road open but “there was no way to put the pipe in and keep traffic maintained.”

Fuller said that the local detour for this project wasn’t the best, but there really wasn’t any other option. She added that ODOT is required to do a detour justification before a road is closed.

“Any time we do a slip repair or bridge or culvert replacement, our design engineers have to justify putting up a detour because we don’t want to close a route when we don’t have to,” she said. “They don’t do it just because they can or because it would be easier.”