ST. FRANCOIS COUNTY, Mo. (News First) – Motorists who travel Route 221 in St. Francois County will be happy to know, the new stretch of road near Doe Run will open back up to motorists sometime late Friday afternoon.
Chris Crocker is the area engineer for MoDOT’s Southeast District. He explains what they have done at this accident-prone stretch of road.
“We’ve reduced the number of curves through there. So there were several S curves or switchback curves going up the hill or down the hill, whichever way you’re coming from. We’ve just reduced the number of curves and we’ve made the curves a little bit more gradual. So they’re not as sharp of a curve as they used to be. And again, that’s gonna allow motorists to drive the speed limit. Obviously we didn’t design it for increased speeds or anything like that, but as long as they’re driving and paying attention and not driving distracted, motorists are gonna be able to navigate those curves a lot more gradually than they used to be in the past,” Crocker says.
Crocker says building new roadways in the Ozark hills can be tough sometimes.
“This one was probably even more challenging so than some of the other locations that we’ve had to work on in the past and a big part of that was due to the fact that there was so much rock excavation needed in order to realign that route. The rock that we were dealing with is granite and it can be very challenging to break that up and excavate it. We did that through blasting. Well, we’ve also have residents along the route, mostly at the top and the bottom of the hill too, so it was one of those things that we had to do the blast in a controlled manner and just a unique project given the terrain and the type of material that we were dealing with,” he adds.
221 also got an asphalt overlay from Farmington to Pilot Knob. Crocker tells News 1st Route 221 near Doe Run will reopen to motorists, possibly a little before 4 o’clock Friday (11/07) afternoon or possibly a little bit after 4 o’clock Friday (11/07) afternoon. The road had been closed since August 21st.
