QUESTION: Why hasn’t the state transportation department reopened a stretch of Southern High School Road that was washed out during Tropical Storm Chantal more than three months ago?
ANSWER: It took Chantal mere hours to disgorge nearly a foot of rain when it passed through Alamance County on the night of Sunday, July 6.
The state, for its part, has been much less precipitous in its response to this unusually brutal tropical storm, whose aftereffects included a large number of road closures, including one section of Southern High School Road that remains off limits to traffic even today.
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This stretch of Southern High School Road is actually one of three storm-damaged roadways in Alamance County that the state’s transportation department had yet to reopen when it updated its online roster of ongoing road projects earlier this month. The latest version of this list also features Chantal-related closures along Gerringer Road in Elon and Dickey Mill Road north of Mebane’s municipal limits.
In each of these cases, the state has found it necessary to replace infrastructure such as culverts or pipes that were washed out during the storm. All three of these projects are also currently slated to wrap up on October 31 – at least if one goes by the target dates that the state’s division of highways has posted online.
The news on the ground appears to be somewhat more promising for two of these ongoing projects, according to Derek Dixon, a division maintenance engineer with the N.C. Transportation Department.
In fact, Dixon informed The Alamance News that Dickey Mill Road has already reopened since his agency posted the latest update to its online inventory of road projects. He added that, barring any unforeseen circumstances, he also expects the work along Southern High School Road to run its course ahead of the Halloween target.
Dixon went on to explain that the biggest obstacle to this byway’s reopening has been the installation of a 12-foot-by-81 foot culvert along the road section washed out during Chantal.
“Right now, we’ve got the culvert installed,” he added in an interview Tuesday. “So, we’re backfilling, and we still have to connect the utilities along the shoulder. But I’m hoping it can be done by the end of October.”
Dixon conceded that the work on this stretch of Southern High School Road has taken a bit longer than anticipated. He attributed part of the lag to his agency’s decision to bring in a specialized hydraulic unit, which determined the specs necessary for the new culvert to weather another natural disaster. Dixon said that the project was then held up by supply chain issues at the state’s only source for this sort of infrastructure.
In any event, Dixon was optimistic that the state can ultimately put this road closure behind it by the end of the month. He wasn’t quite as hopeful, however, about hitting the target for Gerringer Road.
“The contractor that we have to do Gerringer Road has experienced several delays,” he elaborated, “and right now, they’re working on Wayne Road in Guilford County.”
