ST. FRANCOIS COUNTY, Mo. (News First) – It won’t be long now and that stretch of Highway 221 in St. Francois County will open back up to motorists with a brand new section of roadway. Chris Crocker is the area engineer for MoDOT’s Southeast District.
“The project on Route 221, it’s just west and south, I guess you’d say, of Do Run. We’ve had that project, that route, close for about two months now. The contractor actually is starting to pave today. They’re estimating about a week’s worth of paving to finish up the paving aspects of that. Then they’re going to come in and they’re going to dress up the slope so that there’s not a drop off or anything like that,” Crocker says.
Crocker says the number of incidents at this location of 221 were the catalysts that led to get this project going.
“The big reason that we even program this project into our STIP, which is our five-year outlook on projects, and we do this throughout the state, is we try to identify areas where we really need to focus on spending some of our money to be able to enhance the roadway where we’re seeing trends. So we take a look at the data and wherever we’re seeing increased accidents in a particular curve or something like that. So for this instance, the Stono Hill, we were kind of dialed in on that location because the data was really supporting some improvements in that particular location,” he adds.
He continues, “The community was well aware of it. They could see what was going on. They had actually even reached out to us and our planning partners and asked that we consider taking a look at this and seeing what could be done that was a lower cost solution to help improve some of those numbers. Several years back, we did look at putting in the flashing chevrons. So that helps drivers and motorists know that there’s a curve coming up and that they need to reduce their speed. And we tried that for a little while. It still is not getting the results that we want to see at this location. So maybe we need to do something that’s a little bit more involved and basically design a curve that is meeting all the geometric requirements that we have nowadays and go from there. And that’s, that’s how we wound up actually programming that project and designing and constructing it.”
Crocker did not want to give a specific date quite yet on when this section of Highway 221 will reopen but he hopes it will be sometime during the first week in November. The new section of road will replace several existing curves on that hill. Crocker says there will now be less curves and those curves will be more gradual. With rain in the forecast the next couple of days, Crocker says that could further set back the opening of this new section of Highway 221, which is located just outside of Doe Run.
