Work on Highway 5 nears completion

Crews are installing a left-turn lane in front of the new Woods Supermarket as part of a Missouri Highway 5 widening project at the Lake of the Ozarks.
Crews are installing a left-turn lane in front of the new Woods Supermarket as part of a Missouri Highway 5 widening project at the Lake of the Ozarks.

LAKE OF THE OZARKS - By the first snowfall, reaching any Westside destination should be a much safer proposition for those who travel Missouri Highway 5.

And by spring, drivers will once again have an unobstructed view of the water while crossing the main channel of the Lake of the Ozarks near Sunrise Beach.

Work on a $6.4 million project to make Missouri Highway 5 safer for Westside drivers is moving right along and, according to Missouri Department of Transportation engineer Bob Lynch, will be completed by Dec. 1.

Work on a stretch of Highway 5 from Versailles to state Route J in Morgan County has been completed. Construction crews have resurfaced the two driving lanes, and put down the first layer of asphalt on 4-foot wide shoulders between state Route J and the Niangua bridge near Greenview. Currently, they are installing a left-turn lane at the entrance to the new Woods Supermarket in Sunrise Beach.

The widening and resurfacing of Highway 5 began earlier this summer.

In the meantime, workers have begun dismantling the old Highway 5 Hurricane Deck bridge.

Workers with the American Bridge Company are busily dismantling the road surface, side rails and any other detachable parts of the old bridge. By mid-November, workers will set the first charge of explosives needed to remove the bridge's superstructure.

Lynch said the old bridge's superstructure was made in three sections. When the crews are ready to take it down, they will implode each section separately, then break the sections into smaller pieces and drop them into the lake. Once a section has been dropped, crews will use cranes mounted on barges to pick up the pieces and load them onto a truck for disposal.

The new $32.3 million Hurricane Deck bridge was finished nearly four months ahead of schedule and opened to traffic in early September. Lynch said the dismantling project, which was originally set to begin about Jan. 1, is also ahead of schedule but could be delayed if the area has a bad winter.

"They are already taking it apart and the contract gives them until March 1 to finish," he said. "So the old structure should be removed from the lake and the crews gone well before the heavy boat traffic begins next spring."

A third project that will add a center turn lane to Highway 5, along a one-mile stretch of road through Sunrise Beach, is scheduled for the 2014 construction season.