Travel along the Sterling and Seward Highway this winter has been difficult with the amount of snow the Portage Valley and Turnagain Pass has received.
Many have complained that the commute from the Kenai Peninsula to Anchorage is littered with road damage such as potholes. Alaska 511 reports that the Seward Highway from milepost 82 to 78 near Portage Glacier Road around Turnagain Arm is experiencing ongoing asphalt damage and potholes.
Shannon McCarthy, Media Liaison and Admin Operations Manager for the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities says, “This is in the Portage curve area if you’re leaving Kenai, after you get through Turnagain Pass on the flat coming toward Anchorage. It is actually some of the oldest asphalt we have on the Seward Highway. The bad news is that with all this crazy non-winter weather in terms of snow followed up by rain with brief thaw after brief thaw in the middle of January, it causes a lot of pavement damage.”
McCarthy says there is good news on a project happening in the future, “We actually have a really large project that will start this spring and it’s a full blown rehabilitation project so it will rip up all this asphalt. We’re going to have a wider highway there with passing lanes and turning lanes. It’s really going to be a great improvement. Until then, our maintenance forces are playing a little bit of whack-a-mole fixing potholes and then to turnaround and have the section of the highway behind them pothole out again. We wanted to warn people that it’s an ongoing problem. We’re on top of it. We’re working on it. With every next rain, more potholes will appear and we will try our best to keep them filled and keep the highway put together.”
DOT says to use extreme caution in this area and to assume any water in the roadway has potholes.