Crews to work weekends on Eastern Avenue project

By Jeremy Twitchell

Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008 | 1:49 p.m.

Paving crews will work around the clock on weekends to complete their work on Eastern Avenue by Sept. 27.

For the next two weekends, crews will close large chunks of the road from 8 p.m. Friday to 6 a.m. Monday to conduct two “pave-a-thons” designed to limit the project’s impact on drivers and get it done on time.

This weekend, crews will close northbound Eastern Avenue and southbound Anthem Parkway from the point where the two roads split to Reunion Drive. Eastern Avenue’s two inside travel lanes will also be closed between Horizon Ridge Parkway and Pecos Ridge Parkway, leaving one lane of travel open in each direction.

The following weekend, Sept. 12-15, crews will close northbound Anthem Parkway from Reunion Drive to Eastern Avenue and will close the outside two lanes of Eastern Avenue in each direction, between Horizon Ridge Parkway and Pecos Ridge Parkway.

All closures will be effect from 8 p.m. Friday to 6 a.m. Monday.

“We figured if we inconvenience drivers for two weekends of three to four days each, instead of stringing it out for three or four weeks, it would be much better,” Henderson Public Works Project Engineer Jonna Sansom said.

“The pave-a-thon is a no-cost change to the contract, but it definitely gets the paving done quickly and with minimal impact to the public."

In March, workers began laying fiber optic cable along Eastern Avenue from Pebble Road to Anthem Parkway, then along Anthem Parkway to Reunion Drive.

When they finished in June, paving crews began working a portion of that stretch, removing the road’s top layer of asphalt and replacing it with a fresh coat.

The $2.4 million project is being funded by the Regional Transportation Commission. The fiber optic cable that crews installed will hook up the Eastern corridor to the RTC’s Freeway and Arterial System of Transportation (FAST), which is a network of cameras and computers created to control and facilitate traffic flow.

The RTC and Henderson recently added another task to the project, asking crews to build right-turn lanes at Eastern Avenue and Sunridge Heights Parkway. The project will result in two turn lanes — one coming off eastbound Sunridge Heights Parkway to turn north on Eastern Avenue, the other coming off northbound Eastern Avenue to turn east on Sunridge Heights Parkway.

The other two corners of the intersection already have right turn lanes. Sansom said the additions should improve traffic flow on Eastern.

“Currently if you’re traveling north on Eastern, it will back up there at Sunridge Heights,” she said.

Sansom said the RTC added the turn lanes to the project early in the process and set aside about $300,000 to fund them, so the work has been under way and will be completed without adding any time to the project.

Jeremy Twitchell can be reached at 990-8928 or [email protected].