55th Street Milestone - KXNet - Bismarck/Minot/Williston/Dickinson

55th Street Milestone

The initial steps in the Minot 55th Street Northeast Bypass project have been taken and yesterday was a major turning point with the placement of the first bridge beams.
Jordan Pederson has more..

(Jeff McElwain, Project Engineer, Ames Construction) "They started setting the second span of beams for the 55th Street Overpass."
Weighing one-hundred-and-twelve thousand pounds... these one-hundred-and-thirty-four foot-long beams will support the 55th Street bridge.
There bridge is sectioned into ten spans with a total of 70 beams.
Over the next ten days, seven beams will be placed each day forming one bridge span at a time.
(Jeff McElwain, Project Engineer, Ames Construction) "The beams will take about ten to twelve days to set."
It took three months to form the properly sized beams.
The primary contractor for the bridge portion, Ames Construction, just finished pouring columns and caps to form the bridge piers that will support the eleven-hundred foot-long bridge.
(Jeff McElwain, Project Engineer, Ames Construction) "This will be forty feet wide uptop. It will be pretty similar to the broadway bridge."
The bridge will consist of two wide lanes versus 4 narrower lanes.
This 17 million dollar project will provide much needed traffic relief on the east side of town.
(Jeff McElwain, Project Engineer, Ames Construction) "The purpose of this project is to help the traffic in east Minot. Obviously there is a lot of railroad traffic. Hopefully lessen the train stops and people waiting for the trains to get by.">>
The majority of those people are truck drivers.
The bypass will be made as a result of upgrades to County Road 10A, 46th Avenue Northeast, and 55th Street Northeast.
While work to the bypass progresses.. traffic will still be able to access 55th Street.
(Jeff McElwain, Project Engineer, Ames Construction) "That is one of the reasons we slid the bridge over 75 feet so we could keep 55th Street open. We will be closing it down for about a month but we are anticipating that will happen next year."
Jordan Pederson, KX News.