A 2,000-foot section of Old Lemay Ferry Road from the intersection of East Four Ridge and Frisco Hill roads to Regency Woods Place in Imperial has reopened to vehicle traffic, but drivers should remain cautious, Jefferson County Public Works Director Jason Jonas warned.
Jonas said the road fully reopened to traffic on Sept. 2, after a closure began in late May to allow construction and utility crews full access to the road so improvements could be made there.
The crews ran into complications with utility lines over the summer, leading to an extension of the closure. The road was originally set to reopen on Aug. 19.
The improvements included widening the stretch of Old Lemay Ferry between East Four Ridge and Frisco Hill road and Regency Woods Place and softening some of the sharp curves along that stretch. Even though most of that work on that stretch is complete and the road is now open, motorists must stop at a temporary light in both directions on Old Lemay Ferry Road at its intersection with East Four Ridge and Frisco Hill.
Jonas said Spire and Ameren work crews are currently working on Old Lemay Ferry between East Four Ridge and Frisco Hill south to Kneff Road to relocate gas and electric lines out of the way of the county’s construction crews and are expected to finish that work within the next week or two.
“Spire relocated their gas main back in 2022 and said they had built it to avoid conflicts with our construction, but we recently found out they had not,” Jonas said. “Like with all our projects, we thought we had gotten all the utilities out of the way first, and then construction could go smoothly, and it didn’t.
“Our contractor found out (Spire’s gas main) was nowhere near as deep as they said,” Jonas added. “(Spire) hit rock with it and basically put (the line) on top of rock instead of cutting into the rock to the depth they were supposed to.”
The county’s contractor, Above and Below Contracting of Imperial, is set to resume its work on or before Nov. 1.
The safety improvement project will cost $2,473,981.12, with a federal grant covering 80 percent, or $1,979,184.90, and the county covering 20 percent, or about $494,796, with part of its share of a countywide 1/2-cent sales tax for road and bridge improvements, according to the Public Works Department.
Above and Below Contracting was the lowest of the five bidders for the project. It includes sections north and south of the East Four Ridge and Frisco Hill Road intersection. A small portion of Old Lemay Ferry Road south of the intersection was closed from May 27 to June 9 to allow Above and Below to complete “exploratory work” for a proposed retaining wall, according to Public Works.
Also on May 27, a quarter-mile section of the road, from the intersection north toward Regency Woods Place, closed to allow crews to soften a sharp curve, add guardrails and pour high-friction pavement. That portion of the road reopened on Sept. 2.
“We’re about 50 percent of the way done with the project,” Jonas said. “The north half is almost completely done. Once our contractor starts (in November), we’ll have daytime flagging operations. They will go all the way through the winter and then finish up in early spring.”
Jonas said the contractor will focus on completing the southern portion in the spring, and a 2-inch overlay will be poured over the entire road project. A retaining wall will also be built south of the intersection, but Jonas said a construction date has not been set yet for that portion of the project.
“The south part of that intersection carries a bit less traffic than the north half, so we don’t really have any backup cues from those temporary signals, and I don’t anticipate them with flagging during the daytime either,” Jonas said. “So, I think right now, detouring is not necessary. Everything’s open, operational and fully ready for the traffic to go through it.”
However, Jonas warned drivers to be careful as they travel north of the intersection because the Public Works Department has yet to restripe the lanes after recent paving.
“We’ll have that done in the next couple of weeks,” he said. “We like to let the pavement cure for several weeks before we stripe it. We do have the guardrail up, so there’s no fear of sliding down the big hill, but until we get the striping down, we just have the temporary tags.”