Plan your alternate routes: 14th Street bridge closing May 27

Closure will last year and a half while aging structure is replaced
By ARIEL HART
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/08/08

Doomsday for 14th Street bridge users now has a name: Tuesday, May 27.

On that day, Midtown Memorial Day travelers who haven't made it home by midnight Monday should find the bridge closed – for a year and a half.

The closure is to allow workers to replace the aging bridge and add a turn lane and other improvements.

Closure is scheduled between Fowler Street and Williams Street, by the state Department of Transportation. Williams Street, which is one way north, should have at least one lane open throughout the closure.

Introducing the change to latecomer vacationers on the same day that commuting resumes after the holiday weekend wasn't the goal.

When Techwood Drive closed for the bridge project, it happened over the weekend first to give drivers a bit of warning before the week's commute started.

But for the bridge itself, the contractor, C.W. Matthews, juggled a lot of factors to decide the date for the closing, DOT spokeswoman Crystal Paulk-Buchanan said.

They didn't want to close it over the entire Memorial Day weekend. But scheduling it earlier would have been chancy because utility companies and the city of Atlanta are still removing their pipes and wires from the bridge and re-routing them through a tunnel, and that all has to be done before the bridge work begins.

As for waiting to the next weekend, the contractor has a project deadline to meet and didn't want to lose four summer days for construction after work was rained out on recent weekends.

"If you're ready to go, you're ready to go," Paulk-Buchanan said. "Your crews are ready to go, so let's get going."

Besides, she said, "a week sooner the bridge closes is a week sooner it'll re-open."

Another consideration, Paulk-Buchanan said, "their plan is, within three days of the closing they're going to start taking pieces of it off," and they can't dismantle the bridge above moving traffic.

So when they're doing that, they want it to coincide when possible with lane closures that are already happening on the Connector below for a separate re-paving project.