FRANK LEWIS

PDT Staff Report

If you have driven up Gallia Street in Portsmouth in recent days, you may have had to swerve to avoid the ruts and holes. Now, Portsmouth Director of Engineering Crystal Weghorst says the city is in the process of patching those places and other streets in town beginning Tuesday.

While crews from Shelly Company crews will actually start Monday on Winchester Avenue in Sciotoville, they hope to move into the city of Portsmouth proper on Tuesday.

“We’re going to start on (U.S.) 52 east and work our way up 52, doing some stop patches in those really bad areas,” Weghorst said. “We’re going to come back 52 west, and then we’ll start hitting our side streets.”

Weghorst said the city will be working in conjunction with state crews.

“Although those are ODOT (Ohio Department of Transportation) roads, and ODOT will actually be the ones who resurfaces the entire road, the city is just going to spot patch in some of those very bad areas,” Weghorst said. “Roads that cannot just be a pothole patch point - they actually have to be milled up at 200-plus feet at a time. We’re going to mill them up, and then put a really nice surface patch on them. So it will be new asphalt in those areas.”

Weghorst said she has gone out on recent days and driven the streets, determining, along with Portsmouth Mayor David Malone, priorities as to which streets need to be patched first. She said the first patch work will be done around the area of U.S. 52 (Gallia Street) from the Long John Silvers area to McDonald’s.

“The entire surface is not going to be done, just the bad rutted areas are going to be milled out and resurfaced,” Weghorst said. “We’re going to take those (rutted) areas out and cover them, so they’ll be nice and smooth.”

Weghorst said, when crews come back 52 west, they will patch the bad areas from Little Caesar’s Pizza and Speedway, to a bad stretch of road around Sonic and Mitchell Brothers Tires.

“After that we will start working our way to the side streets,” Weghorst said. “We are looking at doing the Esplanade area; Robinson Avenue; Offnere over to Ninth Street, under the Underpass. Those are a few of the areas we will be doing.”

Motorists are being advised that there will be some traffic issues.

“Our law enforcement officers will probably be on site to flag some traffic to help with that because they are heavily traveled areas,” Weghorst said. “We would want the public to just please be patient. There’s going to be delays. They should watch for our construction crews out and about working. Shelly Company has a lot of employees, so they hope to be in and out, and weather permitting, they should be in and out of Portsmouth with all the jobs complete, hopefully in approximately three weeks.”

Frank Lewis may be reached at 740-353-3101, ext. 232, or flewis@heartlandpublications.com