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Road Work Planned for Newfound Gap Road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park

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Published Date

February 22, 2011

It's less than three miles of roadway, but when work begins on a stretch of Newfound Gap Road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park next month, it will at times pinch the road down to one lane, according to park officials.

The work, which is scheduled to begin March 1, will involve a 2.4-mile section of the road from the North Carolina state line at Newfound Gap northward into Tennessee. Funded by a nearly $8 million contract from the Federal Highway Administration, the job involves not just repaving that length of road but also repairing "thousands of feet of stone masonry retaining walls and several drainage culverts," a park service release said.

"At two locations the retaining walls will require extensive re-construction to support the roadbed, necessitating the closure of one lane between March 1 and June 10," the release added.

"At the upper retaining wall worksite, just above the Morton Overlook, flaggers will be used to control traffic around the lane closure during daytime hours, from 8:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m., but two-lane traffic will be restored overnight. At the lower site, traffic signals will be installed to control alternating north-bound and south-bound traffic around the clock, seven days a week."

Beginning June 11 and running until August 15, there will be no daytime lane closures, but they will be allowed between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. during that period, the park said.

“We try very hard to minimize impacts on Park visitors due to road construction. We applied this same lane closure schedule when we rebuilt the North Carolina end of Newfound Gap Road from the state line to Cherokee, NC between 2006 and 2010 and found that delays were modest and complaints almost non-existent," said Great Smoky Superintendent Dale Ditmanson.

Completion of the current contract is scheduled for October 2, 2012. This work is the first of three phases to repair all 15 miles of the road from Newfound Gap to the park boundary at Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a process that park managers expect to finish in 2016.

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