Motorists began riding on a new section of U.S. 79 in Monroe County for the first time in some 80 years last week.
“Everybody is telling me how great it is to go across a smooth highway,” said Clarendon Mayor James Stinson II, noting people can actually reach the 55 mph speed limit. The old route’s condition limited speeds to 35 mph.
“It just took a long time,” the mayor said.
The new section is approximately two miles long. It starts at the small Monroe County community of Roe and heads northeast toward Clarendon, sporting two 12-foot-wide travel lanes and 8-foot shoulders on either side, said Steve Frisbee, construction engineer for the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department’s District 1, which covers Crittenden, Cross, Lee,Monroe, Phillips, St. Francis and Woodruff counties.
The old highway, locally known as “the dump,” had 11-foot-wide travel lanes and no shoulders, Frisbee said. More than 3,000 vehicles use the route daily, according to transportation department figures.
“The dump - it was bad,” Stinson said. “It was unbelievable. The asphalt was falling in. It was like riding a bull when you drove over it.”
The newly opened section is part of three projects, totaling more than $90 mil-lion worth of work, the department has awarded on that section of U.S. 79 and the bridge that takes it across the White River into Clarendon, a community of 1,664.
The department began planning for the work as long as 20 years ago, but most of it came within the last 10 years, according to Lynn Malbrough, chief of the department’s environmental division.
The section dates to the 1930s, according to Glenn Bolick, an agency spokesman. Over the intervening years, it has been periodically repaved.
But to replace it was a challenge because it bisects an ecologically sensitive area.
On one side sits the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says is “one of the few remaining areas in the Lower Mississippi River Valley not drastically altered by channelization and drainage” and “contains some of the most intact and least disturbed hardwood forests in the Mississippi Valley region.” Established in 1986, it encompasses more than 56,000 acres.
On the other side of the highway is the White River National Wildlife Refuge, which the service describes as “one of the largest remaining bottomland hardwood forests in the Mississippi River Valley.” The refuge was established in 1935 and encompasses more than 95 million acres.
Another challenge was the White River itself, which is overseen by the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The bridge also posed a sensitive issue. It was one of three on the White River designed by Ira Hedrick, a University of Arkansas at Fayetteville engineering graduate who went on to become oneof the South’s “outstanding” bridge engineers, according to the 1925 Who’s Who in Engineering. One of those bridges, at Augusta, was torn down almost a dozen years ago.
The new section of U.S. 79 is completed, but projects to build two more bridges, including the crossing over the White River, remain in progress, Frisbee said.
The work on the bridge was delayed by a year after a 2011 record flood on the White River, he said. It won’t be complete until sometime in 2014.
Stinson said the city would have liked to keep the bridge as a pedestrian walkway, which is what Newport is doing with the only other Hedrick-designed bridge left on the river.
The townspeople also worry that the new bridge’s route will prompt people to no longer stop in Clarendon, hurting its sales-tax collections, he said.
Malbrough said his agency tried to look into saving the bridge, but the Coast Guard said leaving the bridge would have left the White River at Clarendon with three bridge crossings in close proximity, thus posing a danger to navigation, Malbrough said.
Stinson harbors no regrets.
“We need the new bridge for safety,” he said.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/17/2012