(Spirit Lake)—Work continues on the rebuilding of Highway 86 between Highway 9 and the Minnesota border. Tony Babcock, a resident construction engineer with the Iowa Department of Transportation’s regional office in Cherokee tells KUOO news paving should start soon…(click here for comment.)
“We are currently, about a mile or two of grading, about two miles of grading, left to go. Shouldn’t take very long. We’re going to start seeing some rock put down here in the next couple of weeks on the south three miles. Hopefully they’ll get some concrete put down on the south two miles probably around the first week or two of September. It’s still looking like we’ll be able to open it sometime around Thanksgiving or so, I think.”
Babcock says the unusually cool wet spring resulted in some significant delays early on in the project, but he says dry weather this summer allowed them to make up for that lost time…(click here for comment.) “The spring wasn’t too kind to us, obviously, as everyone around this part of the state knows. But things dried up and we’ve been able to make some decent headway, so. We’ve been glad to get some dry weather, I know it hasn’t been making the farmers happy but for road building it’s pretty nice.”
Babcock says utility relocation issues have also been posing some special challenges during the project, but he says most of those have since been taken care of.
