CLALLAM BAY — Work on state Highway 112 at milepost 15.8, where mudslides severely damaged the road, will begin on Monday.
The state Department of Transportation (DOT) has obtained a $1.3 million state-funded emergency contract to begin work on the road, a key connecting route to U.S. Highway 101 for Clallam Bay and Neah Bay.
The contract was awarded to Scarsella Brothers Inc. of Kent. Preparations at the site began Friday.
Highway 112 will remain closed during construction. Travelers will continue to use the bypass route on Eagle Pass Way, which was established after the November storms caused the slides.
Crews will work to remove about 40,000 cubic yards of debris in order to rebuild a portion of the highway, stabilize an adjacent slope and conduct drainage and guardrail repairs in addition to hillside seeding and erosion control.
“We know how important this route is to the Neah Bay and Clallam Bay communities, including the Clallam Bay Correctional Facility,” DOT Project Engineer Dan McKernan said.
“We are eager to get to work to reopen (Highway) 112 at Clallam Bay in approximately eight weeks.”
In early November, powerful storms shut down many of the roadways on the Peninsula. Many crews were able to clear them, but the landslides on Highway 112 at milepost 15.8 and milepost 32 posed challenges that require working with the state.
The damage at milepost 32 poses a unique challenge in terms of its repair; DOT hopes it will begin sometime at the end of February.
“There are some settlement issues, said Tina Werner, a spokesperson for DOT. “It’s not a big landslide like at milepost 15.8, where we have nearly 400 feet of debris on the road. The issue with Jim Creek is that it is significantly more complex in terms of design.
“We have been working with our engineering geologists and we are awaiting their final design recommendations on what those long-term repairs for (Highway) 112 at Jim Creek will be.”
Those repairs also would be paid for through emergency funding, with the exact amount to be determined once contacts go out for bid, hopefully in the second week of February, Werner said.
“We don’t have those totals just yet, but once we have a contractor on board, we will,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to be as expensive as the work at milepost 15.8.”
Werner also said both areas were declared disaster sites through the Gov. Jay Inslee’s emergency declaration, which opened the project up to funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
“We were able to track that these disasters were from back-to-back storms and how serious the winter weather has been and the flooding that happened and the back-to-back snowmelt, really like just the perfect conditions for these situations to occur on (Highway) 112,” Werner said.
