Farmington highway undergoing reconstruction
The $2.97 million project will cover
a 2-mile stretch of road.
FARMINGTON – Drivers traveling along routes 4 and 27 in Farmington may have gotten held up a bit this past week.
Get used to it.
The slight delays over the first two weeks of March are due to cleanup crews clearing trees and brush from alongside the road.
Starting in early April, the section between the World War I arch heading out of town to the split off of the two routes, will be the heart of a massive reconstruction project that will last until late next November.
“We’ll start tearing the road up hopefully the first week of April. Then, we’ll be going full force all summer long,” said resident engineer Beecher Whitcomb of the Maine Department of Transportation. “But it’ll be nice when it’s done.”
The 2-mile, $2.97 million project, which was awarded to local contractor E.L. Vining and Sons, will straighten out the dangerous curve near the war memorial arch, add sidewalks, smoothen the travel way and put in a paved shoulder.
Whitcomb said the road is “pretty beat up” right now.
Whitcomb said homeowners along the stretch have been reimbursed for their trees. The wood will be either chipped, turned into lumber, buried in the new slopes created by the project alongside the road or cut into firewood and given back to those it was taken from.
After the trees are all cleared, expected on March 12, the utility companies will take over the approximately two-mile stretch of road for the remainder of the month, Whitcomb said.
They will be setting up new utility poles and moving lines, a process that will last into the summer months. Traffic won’t be much impacted by the utility changes, he said.
Once the actual road construction starts, Whitcomb says flaggers will do their best to get traffic moving. They’ll run two lanes as much as possible, and for certain small stretches, one-way alternating traffic.
“Our dump trucks and our equipment are in that line of traffic too,” Whitcomb explained with a laugh. “So we want to get traffic through there as fast as possible.”
Crews will be hitting the pavement, literally, Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m., he said. If progress falls behind schedule, the crew may work longer days or Saturdays.
Some business owners are concerned that the construction will deter people from the stretch, and drivers will opt to take the Town Farm Road, which goes around the project.
For that reason, Whitcomb stressed that detour signs would not be placed and that project organizers are sensitive to business issues and will do their best to keep traffic moving so drivers won’t want to get in or out of town by another route.
“Hopefully, our crews will generate business lost by the traveling traffic,” he suggested, adding that the project will without a doubt pump money into the economy. “I know I will,” he said.
Roadwork will wrap-up around Thanksgiving time, he said. And crews will be back next summer to add another coat of hot top and perhaps do some more landscaping, such as loaming and seeding.
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