The bumpety-bump that long has characterized a drive along Greenwood’s U.S. 82-49 bypass is expected to disappear soon, but crews likely will be working on U.S. 82 until the early summer.
Two separate projects now are under way along a stretch of U.S. 82 from its intersection with U.S. 49 west of Greenwood at Fort Pemberton to the Leflore-Carroll county line.
APAC Mississippi, which has a plant in the Greenwood-Leflore Industrial Park, recently began the second project. This starts at the top of the U.S. 82-49 overpass and continues 4½ miles to the county line, says Dell Coward, a Winona-based Mississippi Department of Transportation engineer.
Dennis Rodgers, APAC’s area manager, said the second project calls for 75 working days consisting of five- or six-day weeks.
But Coward said APAC expects to take about a month to finish the project “with reasonable weather.”
Lehman-Roberts Co. of Batesville began the first project in September and should be working on it until the end of May.
“We are in the latter stages of it, probably 90 percent complete,” Coward said.
Frontage roads were milled and repaved.
Road crews milled existing pavement off, down to the top of the concrete. They identified areas within the concrete that needed repairs and made the repairs before applying new asphalt.
The first job also includes installation of new traffic lights, painting stripes and affixing reflective markers along the stripes.
“Lane painting, it’s probably going to be another month — four to five weeks — before that is completed,” Coward said. “It takes four or five weeks to get all of the new asphalt down. The striping people like to come in all at one time, weather depending.”
Meanwhile, APAC is handling a third project on U.S. 49 from Rising Sun to the Holmes County line. Rodgers said the highway will be patched, milled, resurfaced with asphalt and striped with paint and reflectors.
“It will be approximately three weeks before we get anything started there,” Rodgers said.
• Contact Susan Montgomery at 581-7235 or smontgomery@gwcommonwealth.com.
