Transportation Department, contractor ‘mobilized just about every side-dumper that we could’ for dike, road bed
The state Department of Transportation has almost completed repairs on a stretch of the Dalton Highway near Deadhorse that was partially washed-out last week by the Sag River.
DOT crews and a North Slope contractor hustled this week to build a sort of levee on a bank of the snowmelt-swollen Sagavanirktok River -- aka, Sag River.
“DOT engineers and hydrologists worked together to come up with a plan to build a dike just upriver of the eroding area, to help divert water away from the road and back toward the main channel,” says John Perreault, a DOT spokesperson.
Perreault says traffic is still limited to one lane at the milepost 403.5 washout, about 10 miles south of end of the road at Deadhorse.
“Repairs are ongoing to the highway,” he said, “and we hope to have it back open to regular two-lane traffic at that point soon.”
The Dalton is the only overland route to Prudhoe Bay and other adjacent oilfields.
Perreault said Thursday that the project required a constant flow of material, including heavy rocks used to reinforce embankments. So DOT pulled together a platoon of dump trucks called side-dumpers.
“We mobilized just about every side-dumper that we could within the area, and called-in as much material as we could from every available pit,” he said. “And we’re going to have to make more.”
DOT sent Anchorage-based Cruz Contracting to a gravel pit 250 miles away at milepost 261, where Cruz and other area operators are excavating to replenish a stockpile of material that was used-up for the dike project.
“Material availability has always been an issue for remote highway projects,” Perreault said. “And this one was particularly challenging, because of the volume that we needed to get and how quickly we needed to get it there.”
He says the dike project serves as a sort of reminder of the need to maintain stockpiles of material, especially around that remote part of Alaska.
