Bladen County has a lot of road construction going on in different areas. NCDOT, Whiteville Resident Engineer, Rusty Marsh mostly spoke with the Elizabethtown Rotary Club about the construction happening at the intersection of 87 and 701 in Elizabethtown.
The construction at the intersection started on March 3rd, 2015 with the prime contractor for the construction being, Barnhill Contracting Company. The contract amount is $13,265,221.98.
The concept Marsh gave was US 701 will take a new alignment on the eastern side and go under NC 87 Bypass. New bridges will be built for each direction on NC 87 Bypass and down at Brown’s Creek. NC Highway 242 is relocated to the southern side of Sampson-Bladen Oil Company. The old piece of NC Highway 242 remains in place for access to Sampson-Bladen Oil Company and the State Employees Credit Union.
Marsh said, “Everything in my career has always been up and over. Now we are going down and under. It’s not quite a tunnel. To tie in 701 and 87 you will have a loop to get you off of 701 to 87 and a ramp to get you off 87 to 701.”
Marsh gave a list of some noteworthy items:
- Largest diameter drainage pipe is 66 inches inside diameter, with smallest being 15 inch pipe totaling 8,896 feet of storm drain pipe to be laid.
- 330,000 Cubic Yards of dirt is removed. 39,000 CY is used on the project in fill sections. The remainder is being used to cover the old Bladen County Landfill site. For comparison, this is about 14 acres at 10 feet deep.
- One half a mile of guardrail will be installed.
- 49,896 tons of new asphalt will be placed on the project.
- 12 each Minority and Women Businesses are being used as subcontractors to help build the project totaling at least $2,586,699.66. That number may grow as the project progresses.
The project should be completed by September 15th, 2017 according to Marsh. The contractor has six additional months to obtain grass growing well over 80% of the project.
Other large Bladen County NCDOT projects he mentioned are:
-NC 11 Cape Fear River project: $14,897,844.14. New bridges should be open in August-September.
-Tar heel Cape Fear River Project: $11,790,386.25. New bridges should be open in July-August.
-NC 210 Bridge Project in Rowan Community: $1,737,271.67. New bridges should open in early June.
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