Serious construction delays are expected on the Seward Highway near mile point 114 – 104. Construction teams will be using a helicopter to hang cable nets on Tuesday, October 26, Thursday October 28 and Saturday, October 30.
Shannon McCarthy, Media Liaison and Admin Operations Manager for the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities:
“This is rockfall mitigation and so we are doing a variety of methods to secure rocks. When we have really good rocks, we are able to pin it to the wall, but in many cases, we are putting in mesh so basically a mesh across a wide area that will catch that small rock and prevent it from bouncing in and going into the travel lanes.”
If you are traveling to and from Anchorage, especially if you plan on flying out of the airport, plan on some longer than normal delays:
“We typically try to keep our contractors to delays of 15 minutes or less, sometimes we’ll go up to 20 minutes. This is a little bit different. We could be holding traffic for quite some time. Much like when we set avalanches off to do that mitigation work in the wintertime, this is similar because we have to have that helicopter between 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., we’ve got to lay this mesh and so we’re asking people it could be you could be delayed a half hour or up to an hour. We just want people to be prepared and if they need to get to the airport, to school, to work, we just want them to leave with a lot of extra time to spare.”
Rockfall mitigation on this stretch of the Seward Highway south of Anchorage is supposed to last at least another year. McCarthy says that whenever work is done between the railroad and the cliff, at least one lane of the highway needs to be shut down. She also says that this type of work has to be done during the least impactful times of the year, which prevents DOT from working on this project during parts of June and most of July.