Palmer-Wasilla Highway undergoes rehabilitation

Drivers who sit with a white-knuckled grip on their steering wheel waiting for an opportunity to turn left off the Palmer-Wasilla Highway while scofflaws pass them on the right-hand side may be relieved to find out that the highway's rehabilitation will include left turn lanes at six busy side streets.

Alaska Department of Transportation (DOT) officials said the pavement -- with the exception of side street approaches -- will be on the road by July 28, and there will also be several new turning lanes at the intersection of the Palmer-Wasilla and Seward Meridian Road.

No new stop lights will be added, and, although many Valley drivers might long for a faster east-west corridor, there will be no new traveling lanes added to the highway this year. This project is more of an improvement to the existing road, according to DOT spokesman Murph O'Brien.

"This is essentially a major rehab -- it hasn't been touched in about 20 years," O'Brien said, adding that a

major east-west corridor is still in the planning stages. "That major project is a couple of years off, and whether it will be the expansion of the Palmer-Wasilla road or the Bogard extension remains to be seen."

Drivers may have noticed a trench just east of Hyer Road last week -- at about four feet deep it looked like something other than pavement rehab. DOT project engineer Bill Klebesadle said that section of the road was suffering from a soft clay under the road bed that had to be dug out and refilled. The problem has been reported by DOT maintenance workers since about 1997, according to Klebesadle.

"The road had started to buckle. We had some clay material in the road that held up for 15 years and then started to fail," Klebesadle said. Most of the remainder of the road bed is solid, though, so the project won't hold up traffic as much as the trench at Hyer Road did last week.

The newest safety feature for the road will be the turning lanes and street lights at some side streets, according to Klebesadle. Traveling east from Wasilla, the lucky left turners will be people pulling off the highway at Begich Drive, Skip Circle, Legacy Lane or Old Towne Drive, the east end of Schelin Spur, Loma Prieta Drive or the Harvest Acres entrance and Equestrian Street.

The busiest intersection to see improvements will be at Seward Meridian Road. Drivers will no longer be tempted to use the shoulder of the road there, as right-turn lanes will be added for all four directions of travel. The new pattern also allows DOT to remove the red arrow from the left-turn only lanes and install a sign that says "yield on green." DOT contractors will be working at night and stop during peak traffic times every morning and afternoon throughout the project, according to Klebesadle.

Because the design allows for a 55-mile-per-hour speed limit when the project is finished, there won't be any medians or curbs added at any of the intersections.

"This is just going to have striped protection -- on anything over 45 we don't want to put curbs in the road," Klebesadle said.

Guardrails that meet new safety standards are being installed along with the pavement. Drivers might notice that the guardrail contractor uses both wood and steel posts in the construction. The wood posts are at the ends of the guard rails and designed to shear off when a car hits them.

"You've seen them all over the states, and now we're finally getting them here," Klebesadle said, "These collapse on themselves to keep the rail from impaling the grill of a car."

The wood posts are mounted into metal tubes driven into the ground by a drop hammer, and the steel posts are driven in by a vibratory hammer. Both pieces of equipment are truck mounted and equally noisy and intrusive -- think of giant jack hammers -- one drives the wooden post's tube into the ground with about 10 strikes. With the other, the steel post is loaded into its barrel and struck countless times in rapid succession.

People who save up their milk jugs will be happy to know that the black spacer blocks between the posts and the rails are made from recycled plastic.