A pavement replacement project on Interstate 30 in Saline County just west of the Hot Springs exit should be complete by mid-March, a state Highway and Transportation Department official said Friday.
The 3-mile-long work zone has been active since April and was initially expected to be complete around September, department spokesman Danny Straessle said Friday.
Straessle said the stretch of highway under construction was a test area that was designed to fail over a period of time so the pavement and different maintenance techniques could be studied.
"That study period ended, so we had to go in there and rip up the road and basically rebuild it from scratch. The contractor got in there and realized as they were tearing the pavement out and resetting the grade that the soil wasn't what we expected it to be, so we had to do some stabilization in there.
"They took it down to the nub and beyond, reset the grade, and we're going to put fresh concrete on top of it and that is what they are doing," he said.
The contractor is Weaver-Bailey of El Paso in White County, Straessle said.
Periods of heavy rain made the nonstabilized soil even worse, which prevented the contractor from working on the project for some time, Straessle said.
Metro on 02/10/2016