Colorado Department of Transportation’s project to realign U.S. Highway 550 and reconnect it with U.S. Highway 160 just south of Durango has entered a phase of massive excavation ahead of the project’s forecast completion in spring 2023.
Trucks are moving about 200 loads of material per day from an area north of County Road 220 near Three Springs to carve a path for the realignment of Highway 550. With warm and clear weather, work has been progressing with only a short winter delay as the agency and contractors, Lawrence Construction, keep pace with the project timeline.
“We had a very brief holiday shutdown in December for the Christmas holiday,” said Lisa Schwantes, Southwest regional spokeswoman for CDOT. “We have not had what we would call a typical winter shutdown for a couple or three months.”
Excavators and trucks must move about 500,000 cubic yards of dirt to connect Highway 550 with the about 520-foot main bridge that will lead to U.S. Highway 160, what some call “the bridge to nowhere” and CDOT calls the Grandview interchange.
Trucks currently bring the excavated dirt to a nearby crushing site where the dirt and rocks are pulverized for recycling as road base for the project.
In total, construction crews will move about 1.2 million cubic yards of material, of which about 900,000 cubic yards – the equivalent of 300 Olympic swimming pools – will be reused, said Nancy Shanks, public information manager for the project.
“We have been working nonstop because we have so much earth to move,” Schwantes said.
In addition to excavation, crews are also building the new road base for new northbound lanes of Highway 550 and finishing the large and small mammal crossings that are a part of the project.
“First, we’ve got to lay all of that material as the base of the road, then we’ll pave on top of it,” Schwantes said.
The next significant step in the project will be the paving of northbound lanes from County Road 302 to County Road 220, which project managers aim to start in May, though that timeline is weather dependent, Shanks said in an email.
Once the two northbound lanes are completed, CDOT will shift two-way traffic onto the new road while construction continues on southbound lanes of Highway 550. That will likely take place in June, Shanks said.
Throughout the work, CDOT will try to minimize impacts to travelers.
“We’re really hoping to have limited impacts to travel,” Schwantes said. “We’ll be able to keep traffic flowing on the old lanes as we build the new highway.”
CDOT’s 550-160 Connection South project is a sprawling redevelopment of the two-highway junction aimed to increase safety and improve the flow of traffic.
CDOT and contractors Lawrence Construction and RS&H Inc. will build the first full highway interchange in Southwest Colorado, in which highways do not intersect and the flow of traffic does not stop, and sections of Highway 550 are expanded to four lanes south of Durango.
In addition to the highway realignment and expansion, CDOT and its team will add new landslide mitigation, retaining walls, county road intersections, turn lanes, frontage roads, two large mammal underpasses, up to 32 small mammal crossings and deer fencing and guards.
Robust wildlife safeguards are meant to significantly improve driver safety. According to the project website, animal-vehicle collisions have accounted for 56% of all crashes along that stretch of highway.
The widened road and shoulders of the new divided highway will improve safety for cyclists in addition to drivers, Shanks and CDOT said.
Construction first began in summer 2020 and is slated for completion by spring 2023. Small delays for holidays and weather are factored into the project timeline, and the project is on pace to meet its scheduled deadline next year, Shanks said.
The redevelopment is also within its $98.6 million budget.
Upon the project’s completion, Highway 550 along Farmington Hill will be abandoned and revegetated as the new road reroutes drivers to roundabouts and free-flowing entrances and exits along Highway 160 to the east.
ahannon@durangoherald.com
