The opening of the Durham East End Connector has been delayed again
When construction of the East End Connector began in the spring of 2015, the four-mile highway between the Durham Freeway and Interstate 85 was expected to be finished in 2019.
By the end of 2019, the N.C. Department of Transportation was saying the road would be done this past June. In June, the department estimated it would be completed by the end of the year.
Now NCDOT says the section of the East End Connector between the Durham Freeway and U.S. 70 — the new stretch of road that closes a gap between two existing highways — probably won’t open to traffic until this coming June.
The latest holdup has to do with a railroad bridge that crosses U.S. 70 near where it merges with the new section of highway. Maira Ibarra, the assistant resident engineer who manages the project for NCDOT, said the concrete piers that hold up the bridge are in the path of some of the new lanes of the wider road.
The railroad bridge is temporary and should have been gone by now. It was built to carry CSX and Norfolk Southern trains over U.S. 70 while two parallel permanent bridges were demolished and replaced with new ones that can accommodate the wider highway.
“Originally the railroad bridges were supposed to be done in the first two or three years of the project,” Ibarra said in an interview. “There were a lot of construction issues with the permanent bridges that caused a lot delays.”
Among the problems, Ibarra said, was that the steel girders for the new railroad bridges did not bend properly when the concrete platform was poured on top.
The problems have been fixed and contractors are laying tracks on the two new bridges. Once they open, it will take some time to demolish the temporary bridge and finish paving the new lanes underneath.
“That’s minimal work because the majority of the pavement is already down,” Ibarra said.
Contractors can be financially penalized for delays in NCDOT projects, but the department waits until the work is completed to determine how much could have been avoided and what could not. The general contractor on the connector project is Dragados USA based in New York City.
The East End Connector was expected to cost $142 million to build. It includes constructing a new 1.25-mile highway between the Durham Freeway (N.C. 147) and U.S. 70 and converting about 2.75 miles of U.S. 70 to a freeway.
When the East End Connector opens, the highway stretching from I-85 south to I-40 near Research Triangle Park, including parts of the Durham Freeway, will be known as I-885.
