Parks Highway goes to 1 lane starting Saturday for bridge work near Wasilla

Drivers on a section of the Parks Highway near Wasilla should anticipate potential half-hour delays beginning Saturday and lasting through the end of the month, as construction crews prepare to build a new bridge.

Shannon McCarthy, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, said crews working from 7 a.m. Saturday until 6 a.m. Oct. 31 will build a retaining wall at Mile 46.5 near Museum Drive, just west of Wasilla city limits. The wall will help support a planned two-lane bridge over Alaska Railroad tracks dedicated to northbound traffic on the Parks.

McCarthy said the $42 million project, part of an effort to expand just over 4 miles of the Parks to a four-lane divided highway, remains on schedule for completion by August of next year.

Crews will be working 24/7 once the lane restriction begins. McCarthy said flaggers are needed because construction cranes operating along one lane of the existing two-lane Parks Highway bridge will periodically extend into the other lane of travel.

A Monday post on the department's Facebook page, addressing questions about the project, anticipates lengthy delays. Flaggers will prioritize the highway's busiest direction of travel at any given time, but some drivers may be flagged to stop multiple times before they're able to pass the site.

"Delays of 30 minutes are expected and wait time could even be longer," DOT officials wrote. "There are no suitable detours for the Parks Highway in the area."

Although some nearby routes allow drivers to bypass the work site, the department isn't recommending that anybody do so because the roads involved are neighborhood streets that aren't able to accommodate the overflow or speeds involved.

"This is not something that we would instruct highway traffic to use," McCarthy said. "The volumes are such that we would not want highway traffic to use residential roads as a detour."

No Alaska Railroad trains will be delayed by the work, McCarthy said.

Planners with the department had considered other designs for the project, including a temporary bridge to alleviate traffic issues during the work — but McCarthy said that idea was rejected because it would cost more than the wall itself.

"In terms of being fiscally constrained, there weren't many options," McCarthy said.

In addition to the continuous work schedule, McCarthy said the state and contractor Knik Construction took steps to build the wall as quickly as possible once the lane restriction begins. Most materials for the work have been pre-positioned near the site, and wall sections have been prefabricated for rapid installation once they're needed.

Given those measures, McCarthy said, there's a chance that the wall work — and the lane restriction — may end ahead of schedule.

"It is a possibility," McCarthy said. "We're certainly trying to minimize (construction time) as much as possible, but we do want to be realistic as well."