A July 13 article about the Woodrow Wilson Bridge misstated the distance involved in the lane reductions on the outer loop of the Capital Beltway this weekend. The outer loop will be reduced to one lane for about a mile, not six miles, on the Virginia side of the bridge. Also, the article said a ramp to Church Street would close for three years starting this weekend. It will close for three years within the next month.
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A Three-Day Jam at Wilson Bridge
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The structures will have eight general-use lanes to match the number feeding from the Beltway, plus one transit lane and one merge lane on each side. Several interchanges in Virginia and Maryland also will be upgraded to increase capacity on the Beltway and to accommodate the additional lanes on the bridge. Most of those projects will be finished by the time the second of the two new span opens, although improvements to the Route 1 interchange will not be completed until the middle of 2009, and the Telegraph Road interchange will not be finished until late 2011.
A casualty of the next phase of construction is the ramp from the inner loop to Church Street in Alexandria, which will close this weekend for the next three years to accommodate Beltway widening.
This weekend's closures will provide a 57-hour window for highway workers to lay asphalt between the outer loop and the new lanes.
The realigned section is a slight, banked turn that requires laying up to 24 inches of asphalt. About two to three inches of asphalt can be laid at a time. When it hits the ground, it has a temperature of about 300 degrees and must cool to about 130 to 150 degrees before another layer can be added.
That takes time, project officials said, and the highway cannot be opened while the asphalt cools. Project officials said they also need to close two Beltway lanes to stage equipment and to serve as a safety buffer for workers and drivers.
Project managers chose to do the work over the weekend because there are fewer drivers and fewer peak periods on Saturdays and Sundays. On a typical weekday, about 91,000 drivers are on the outer loop, compared with about 72,000 during weekends.
Nonetheless, highway users are expecting significant pain. Mike Russell, spokesman for the American Trucking Associations said concerns about potential delays are so severe that they are sending messages across the nation warning truckers away from the area.
"Hopefully, having this much lead time, they can adjust accordingly," Russell said.
Project officials said they are spending $350,000 this summer to alert drivers via e-mail, radio, newspaper and other mediums about the expected delays. Undeland said radio ads are playing in Richmond and the Tidewater area and as far south as the Outer Banks of North Carolina in an effort to scare drivers from the area.
Project officials also said they are adding extra tow trucks, safety vehicles and other incident response equipment so an accident or another problem doesn't further delay workers or motorists.
A spokesman for the Springfield Interchange project said there also could be weekend work there, but it probably would not add to delays.
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