Miller Bay Road corridor almost clear of extensive construction

KINGSTON — The end is near for North End motorists who have, time after time, found themselves stalled once they reach either Gunderson or Indianola roads via Miller Bay Road. The construction projects along the corridor will be completely wrapped up by the end of November, just in time for residents to celebrate the holidays.

The road getting to the light of the end of the tunnel has not been smooth by any means, with drivers facing upwards of 40-minute waits, or longer, during the final paving process in September.

Kitsap County Public Works construction manager Jacques Dean said residents will be seeing a significant drop in wait times this week as the striping has been completed. The final step yet to be accomplished is to install traffic signals and get the system running, which could take until the end of this month.

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“The bridge is done, we striped it (last) week, it really looks nice,” he said. The bridge replaced a culvert and will be more environmentally friendly for Grover’s Creek. “The signal poles are to be delivered (this) week and the end of the month, we’ll have the system up. We still have some minor traffic delays while we put the signals up.”

There were a number of complaints from the beginning of the project in early July, stemming mainly from the fact that the length of roadway being worked on didn’t lend itself well to detours and has a number of residents using it as a thoroughfare.

“There were a fair number of complaints and concerns, especially when they closed the road for the bridge,” said Kitsap County Commissioner Steve Bauer. “There wasn’t an awful lot we could do about it at that point… We did agree the next time we do a project, we would try to start it later in the day so as not to interrupt the morning commuters and at least make it easier for them during half of the commute.”

The limitations of the site itself, between Indianola and Gunderson roads, also made construction difficult because there were different situations that needed to be restructured for the small construction zone. Dean said there were points during the project when large trucks would be dumping dirt, blocking up all lanes of traffic on all of the roads impacted.

“Because it was such a narrow and confined site, and we had to bring in dirt in big trucks and trailers, and they would have to jackknife to dump their dirt,” he said. “Each dump took about four minutes, and they would go back to the Shine pit, and come back… Sometimes we’d have trucks stacking up.”

Dean said there was also a point in the construction that coincided with the Suquamish Tribe’s Grover’s Creek Hatchery’s cycle of hatching salmon eggs. Vibrations from the project was damaging to the sensitive eggs, and was detrimental to the hatchery’s process.

The tribe and Stan Palmer Construction worked out a way to continue work and keep from harming the eggs, but it set the wait times in September back a few weeks and cost the county an extra $100,000 in addition to the projects price tag of $3.3 million, Dean said.

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