By Jay Ermis
Managing Editor
March 15, 2008 12:37 am
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Two major U.S. highways and three state highways weave their way through Walker County, providing a path for thousands of vehicles daily.
The heavy traffic — passenger vehicles and trucks — and all weather conditions take their toll on roadways countywide.
The responsibility of maintaining and upgrading of state and federal highways, farm-to-market roads and designated park roads falls on the 17-member maintenance section of the Texas Department of Transportation’s Huntsville office.
A current project takes in a one-mile stretch of road — also known as Southwood Drive — that links state Highway 75 South to state Highway 19 and Interstate 45.
Another part of the project is upgrading the frontage road from the Goree Unit overpass to Southwood.
Bobby Wells, roadway maintenance supervisor, said improvements being made to the two roads are “part of our routine work.”
The Huntsville crew is taking the Southwood road down to the subgrade, cement treat the subgrade, followed by a 6-inch base and sealcoating.
He said the frontage road was cement-treated followed by a prime seal. It also awaits a final sealcoating. Both sealcoating jobs will be done at the same time.
Wells said he calls the short stretch of road on the west side of Highway 75 Southwood Drive because Southwood runs north of the Goree Unit, ending at Highway 75 South, and on the opposite side ends at Farm-to-Market Road 2929.
Wells said the one-mile stretch does not have a designated name nor is shown on a Texas map. It is shown on the Walker County map, but is not labeled.
The roadway handles a substantial amount of traffic daily, particularly northbound tractor-trailer rigs that have to take the Goree exit because loads are higher than normal.
Wells said the height of the Goree overpass is regulation, but there are 18-wheelers that have to exit and return to I-45 via the short stretch of Southwood Drive.
Since the road does not officially have a name or designated highway number, Wells speculates it was constructed for use as a detour road when Highway 19 was under construction several decades ago.
He bases his theory about the detour road because it has the same materials as Highway 19.
“I guess you would call the road an extension of Southwood Drive,” Wells said. “I don’t think that is what it was originally built for, but that is what it turns out to be.”
Wells said the road is open to normal traffic “anytime we are not out there.”
“The repairs we are doing should make it a better road,” he said. “We are running a little bit behind on it. We had to divert from working on the two roads because culverts had washed out on FM 2929.
“We started on the frontage road four weeks ago. It won’t be quite the same as the Southwood part, but it will be substantially beefed up.”
Wells said the Huntsville maintenance section works roadways in Walker County not under construction.
“We do sealcoating and we do spot repairs like small sections of a road that has failures in them,” he said. “We go in and apply whatever repairs that are needed.
“We try to upkeep the edges of the road and mailbox turnouts. We do vegetation control on the sides of the roads and all of the signing and any kind of guidance markers and guardrails.
“If it is out there in our right of way, we maintain it. Some of the maintenance work we get help from contract work and a lot of it we do.”
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