City of Beatrice, contractor hold open house on South 13th reconstruction

BEATRICE – When a major street reconstruction project gets underway this spring in south Beatrice…providing access to nearby residential properties will be a bit tricky.

An open house was held Thursday at the Beatrice Country Club, about the reconstruction of South 13th between Beaver and Oak Streets…and how it will affect nearby residents.

Erich Tiemann is with R.L Tiemann Construction….the contractor awarded the job. "We'll pour one side all in one piece, so we can make a one-lane road, on the new road. Length-wise, we'll tear out one half....get one side in....start using it for traffic, and then start piecing the other side out. The far south house on the east side has access, but the next three homes do not. I'm not exactly sure what we're doing there yet, but we're going to try to keep access to each of their houses, possibly with a temporary rock road. But, there will may be some times when they don't have access, for a while."

Tiemann says a driveway serves as access for most of the homes….but three houses nearby along the street face a different situation. "We're lucky here, because we have two condos and a main road that goes back to most of the homes, so we can hit those with half-width drives...so they'll still have entrance. It's those three individual homes along there that pose more of an issue, I suppose."

The contract period is listed at 100 days…but that’s before accounting for weather interruptions.  "I''m already counting my rain days out....where they are going to be. If we don't get hit with rain we may be able to cut this just north of the half-way mark for time. If we run into a lot of rain it's going to take longer....hopefully within the 100 days."

Tiemann says one thing yet to be discovered is the condition of the subsurface along the street.

"I would anticipate that we are going to have some fairly decent soil....and then being on a hill like that, you usually have good drainage, instead of all that moisture just sitting there, The area I would be most nervous about for subsurface is on that far north end and in that intersection. When we tore that out before, it was pretty rough....so I would anticipate some over-excavation."

Thursday, from four until six p.m., information boards on the project area and city officials were available at the Beatrice Country Club for residents to stop by and find out what will be going on with the work.

Tiemann says traffic that uses Oak Street to the southwest as an alternate, will help out.  "If we can get people to go the other route as much as possible, to the south of the project...the traffic to the country club...they can kind of bypass most of it, other than when we're working on the intersection, south".