ODOT officials say highway blasting won"t hurt homes
By Nick Claussen
March 27, 2008
Blasting will begin around Nelsonville for the highway bypass project next month, even though work on the actual highway won’t begin until 2012.
The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) held a public meeting with Nelsonville residents on Monday at Hocking College to tell them what they can expect with the blasting. Several of the residents said they came to the meeting concerned about the blasting, but left feeling much more comfortable.
ODOT is planning to build a bypass of U.S. Rt. 33 to the north of Nelsonville. The project will create nine miles of new highway, much of it traveling through the Wayne National Forest. In order to build the highway, 3.5 million cubic yards of dirt will have to be moved, as hillsides are lowered and valleys are filled for the new road.
W. Keith Best, assistant operations manager for Sauls Seismic, Inc., a private company that will be doing some of the excavation work, explained that the blasting will begin on April 15 and continue into next year. Additional explosive work for the project may also be needed in the next several years, he said.
The work will be done up to six days per week, and there may be two or three blasts each day, Best estimated. The blasting work can only be done between sunrise and sunset, and a siren will go off two or three minutes before each explosion, he said.
Several people at the meeting wanted to know if the explosions will make their homes shake, how loud it will be, and if it might damage their properties.
Lancaster resident Tom Wilson, for example, wanted to know what his 89-year-old mother could expect in her home near the highway project.
“Can she expect a lot of rocking and rolling?” he asked. He also asked if the workers can warn her before they blast near her home.
Best said that the workers can notify her and will work to let people closest to the blasting area know before the construction work begins.
Asked if the blasting will affect pictures hung on the wall, Best said it might.
“If you have something that you cannot replace, I’d suggest taking it down,” Best said. He added that children running through a house can also cause vibrations that knock down pictures, and said most items hung on a wall will fall eventually.
When people hear and feel the blast, they won’t actually be feeling the ground move, Best said.
“What you are feeling is the air pressure hitting your house,” he said. He compared it to when a door slams near you and you can feel the rush of air from the door closing.
“All they are trying to do is crack the rock,” he said. Nothing will fly into the air, and the underground rocks will remain in large pieces that can be used to fill in other areas.
“It’s pretty uneventful,” Best said. “This is a controlled blast.”
Dave Lucas, blast coordinator for Wampum Hardware (a company also assisting with the blasting work) explained that the explosive charges are set 14 feet apart so that the each blast can crack the rocks 7 feet around them. Lucas said work will not affect the ground around nearby homes.
When ODOT was building the new portion of U.S. Rt. 33 southeast of Athens, many residents living on the southeast side of the city were upset about the blasting. Several said the explosions affected their properties and damaged the foundations of their homes.
Best promised, however, that the blasting work will not hurt any nearby foundations. If property owners see cracks in their foundations after the blasting work, Best said the cracks were probably there before but no one ever noticed. It’s not uncommon for property owners to see cracks after excavation work and blame nearby blasting for the problem, he maintained.
“They just don’t pay attention,” he said, adding that he doesn’t pay much attention to how his foundation looks at his house. His firm has been doing inspections of 100 homes near the blasting area to check the condition of the homes before the work begins, Best added.
The blasts will not cause windows to crack, ground to slip or other problems to occur, he said.
Wilson said after the meeting that he’s relieved to hear what Best and the others had to say about the work on the highway. “I feel better,” he said.
Diana Smathers said she came to the meeting mainly concerned about how the blasting will affect her neighbors. “I feel a lot more comfortable,” she said.
Smathers added that she has seen several of her neighbors sell their properties to ODOT to make way for the highway, and said it has been sad to see so many people have to leave.
WHILE THE BLASTING work will begin in April and construction on an access road for the new interchange will begin this year, work on the actual highway will not start until 2012 under ODOT’s current schedule.
Stephanie Filson, public information office for ODOT’s District 10 office in Marietta, explained Wednesday that the majority of the excavation work for the highway will be done this year and next, and the blasting work will be completed in several phases. The work will start in the Dorr Run area and move toward Ohio Rt. 278 in Nelsonville later in the year.
The first phase of the construction process includes excavation work for the bypass, preparing land for the interchange that will be built in the Dorr Run area, and building an access road to that interchange.
The other two phases of the construction project are not scheduled to begin until 2012 and 2015, and the project is not expected to be finished until 2017, Filson said
“The work that we are planning on doing this season and next construction season is work that can wait,” Filson said, explaining that the excavation work is effective, whether construction starts immediately or in several years.
“Any work done now, it won’t be done for naught,” Filson said.
ODOT has purchased 44 structures for the project, including 32 residences and 12 barns/sheds, according to Filson. Many of the structures been demolished already, she added.
The new four-lane highway will extend from where the current four-lane portion of the highway turns into a two-lane road near Haydenville northwest of Nelsonville, to where the two-lane portion turns back into a four-lane highway near Hocking College, to the southeast of Nelsonville.
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