Navigating Exit 20 and the Highway 98 overpass on Interstate 55 is going to become more roundabout in the near future.
Albert White, district engineer for the Mississippi Department of Transportation, told McComb Lions Club members last week that one of the next major projects on the radar in Pike County is eliminating the cloverleaf design of the exits and routing them into roundabouts that will be installed at each side of the overpass.
“It will be similar to what they’ve got in Walker, Louisiana,” he said, referring to the exits and overpass off Interstate 12.
White said traffic conditions in the area warrant the changes.
“There are some accidents there, but not a lot,” he said. “The state didn’t want to approve the project, but I told them to come down and look at it. There are a lot of near misses.”
The project will cost about $70 million at current estimates, because of the inflationary pressures in the economy.
Other upcoming projects in Pike County will also concentrate on Interstate 55.
White said MDOT will “rubble-ize” the concrete from Exit 20 to Exit 15 in McComb, upgrade the base and resurface with blacktop.
Also on the drawing board is the connection of Exits 17 and 18, Delaware Avenue and Veterans Boulevard, which will entail building a new traffic lane on either side of the interstate, running from one interstate on-ramp to the next off-ramp.
And there are plans to increase the height of the overpasses on I-55 in Pike County, except for the Highway 98 overpass at Exit 20, which he said was not designed and built for that to be possible.
“The cost is similar cutting down the lanes below,” White said. “The difference is safety. This way, we can keep the high-speed traffic (on the interstate) moving instead of stopping it.”
Each of the overpasses will have to be closed while being raised, which means the Delaware Avenue overpass, recently closed because a collision from a truck carrying a large tank from late October to mid-December, will eventually have to be closed again.
White called the damage to the Delaware overpass the “worst I’ve seen,” and said it was his decision to close the bridge until it was repaired for driver safety.
“It was only closed two months,” he said. “That’s fast for government work. That’s possible when you have a good contractor that’s willing to work and the weather is good.”
The project cost more than $700,000, and the state will recover that from the truck company’s insurance carrier.
“We can recoup the cost, but we can’t recoup the lost business,” White said.
Projects on Highways 44 and 570 are nearing completion, he said, and contractors are almost ready to restripe after repaving Presley Boulevard.
Other nearby projects in the works include replacement of the Homochitto River bridge on U.S. 98 in Franklin County and the replacement of both of the U.S. 98 bridges over the Pearl River at Columbia.
White said he and other MDOT personnel will consider what changes might need to be made to accommodate a higher volume of 18-wheeler traffic at I-55’s Exit 13 at Fernwood when the new Coca-Cola bottling plant is completed; and consider another traffic light on the east side of the interstate at Exit 15, where traffic may increase thanks to development of a new Kia dealership next to The Claiborne.
