Free Daily Headlines

News

Set your text size: A A A

Greenville Highway at Erkwood closed for construction next two weekends

Greenville Highway at Erkwood Drive and Shepherd Street will be closed the next two weekends for construction work on a roundabout.

 

The intersection will be closed this Friday night through Sunday morning and March 1-3 while crews move utility lines. Expected to be completed by the late summer of 2020, the $3 million project replaces the hazardous intersection of two misaligned roads that T into Greenville Highway. Utility crews and an NCDOT contractor have cleared a large site for the roundabout.

They had planned to begin work on deep excavation and moving underground utility lines but the forecast of rain Saturday and Sunday postponed the work, NCDOT spokesman David Uchiyama said. An NCDOT engineer at the work site said the job requires asphalt to recover the broken part of the highway and asphalt plants would be closed due to rain.

Now the work is scheduled next weekend and the following weekend. The work will close the road at 7 Friday night until Sunday morning “in time for church,” Uchiyama said.

The Greenville Highway roundabout is one of three NCDOT projects currently under construction. The others are a $6.1 million widening of Old Airport Road in Naples and a $3.5 million completion of a road through Broadpointe Industrial Park on N.C. 280 in Mills River. The biggest project by far is scheduled to start later this year and last two to three years. The $472 million project widens the interstate highway from four to six or eight lanes. The segment in Henderson County runs from Exit 40 (Airport Road) to Exit 49 (Four Seasons Boulevard). The six-laning project from Four Seasons Boulevard to Exit 54 (the U.S. 25 Connector) has been delayed until 2027 — beyond the span considered committed under the NCDOT construction scheduling system.

The I-26 job goes out for bids in June and should be under construction about 45 days after that, Uchiyama said. The job requires the contractor to keep two lanes open in either direction, except in cases where closure is unavoidable, such as work on bridges and overpasses. That’s not to say there won’t be slow-downs. “Sometimes they’ll be skinny lanes,” he said.