By Pepper Fisher

PORT ANGELES – DOT crews took a major step in the construction of the new Elwha River Bridge project last Friday.

They poured concrete on the first of three massive bridge spans across the river. Mark Krulish from the Washington State dept. of Transportation says the other two spans, which are linked end-to-end, will be poured over the next two weeks.

“And obviously, those deck pours, they have quite a bit of curing time. So, that’s why there’s some time in between the two. And we’ve got some other work coming up. We’ve got constructing the barriers on the edges of the bridge, and we’ve got some electrical work happening near Olympic Hot Springs Road, and then we’ll be getting towards the 9-day closure. You know, we’ll pave at the bridge end, and we’ll start prepping for those tie-ins.”

The dreaded 9-day closure of Highway 101 just west of Port Angeles, is coming this spring or summer. Krulish says in order to tie the existing highway into the new bridge, they’ll have to put workers and machines on the highway at both ends of the bridge to pour concrete and do all of the other things to get it ready for traffic.

It won’t be convenient, but the DOT will have detours ready to go.

“We’ll have a detour onto State Route 112 and State Route 113 to get around the bridge. In the weeks leading up to the closure, we’re going to do some work on State Route 112, do some paving and some improvements for the detour route. And we are currently targeting June for that nine-day closure.”