Hoping to stop recurring issues with a section of the road, the city of Chattanooga will build a land bridge on Lake Resort Drive to permanently fix an unstable roadway slope, a project that officials expect will cost almost $7.4 million.
Ben Taylor, the city's interim deputy administrator of transportation and street maintenance, said in an email the area in question along the Tennessee River becomes saturated during heavy rainfall, which causes the slope to shift.
The Chattanooga City Council on Tuesday approved a nearly $6.5 million contract with Dement Construction Co. to build the bridge, which includes a contingency of about $590,000. The panel also authorized payment to the Tennessee Department of Transportation for engineering and inspection costs as well as for testing and oversight.
Taylor expects construction will start in the spring and take about a year and five months.
The city will cover the $7.4 million price tag using a combination of Federal Highway Administration emergency relief funds and dollars available through a federal grant. Taylor said local dollars will fund about 56% of the cost.
The bridge will replace a section of Lake Resort Drive starting about 1,000 feet east of its intersection with North Access Road.
The road sits in the district represented by Councilman Ken Smith, of Hixson, who said in a phone interview Monday that he recalled the road requiring repairs about 10 years ago. The city restabilized and repaved that section of Lake Resort Drive, Smith said, but the same issue occurred again in the same spot several years later, affecting the lane closest to the river.
"The roadway cracked right on the double yellow line and just started sinking," Smith said.
Smith said studies determined the type of repair the city had been implementing to support the roadway wouldn't be permanent, noting its proximity to the river and the flow of underground water.
Smith said he pulled together a meeting with the state and city departments of transportation and members of the local legislative delegation to discuss the best path forward.
"All the parties involved had decided that inevitably we could keep repairing this until -- God forbid -- it happens while someone is driving on it, or (we could) take a step to get a permanent fix in place, which is the bridge," Smith said.
Taylor said crews repaired the road in 2008 and rebuilt it with a rock buttress around 2013. A significant rainstorm in 2019 caused a shift in the roadway, making it necessary for the city to close a lane for an extended period of time. About 800 feet of the eastbound lane had dropped by about 8 inches.
Workers made a deep patch repair in 2020 so the city could reopen the street while searching for a permanent solution, Taylor said Monday. Inclinometers show continued movement in the area of the temporary repair.
"This is a significant project in my district that I've been pushing since 2014 to have done correctly," Smith said. "For eight or nine years, this has been a really critical project for me, so I'm very excited to get to the point where we can make it happen."
Contact David Floyd at dfloyd@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6249.
Staff Photo / In 2019, a portion of Hixson's Lake Resort Drive is reduced to a single lane following damage to the roadway.