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North Road in Hampton Bays will be closed September 10 through the end of October due to construction on the Long Island Rail Road overpass. CAROL MORAN
North Road in Hampton Bays will be closed September 10 through the end of October due to construction on the Long Island Rail Road overpass. CAROL MORAN
North Road in Hampton Bays will be closed again to traffic starting early next week due to continuing work on the Long Island Rail Road bridge there, according to Thomas Neely, Southampton Town’s public transportation and traffic safety director.
The stretch of road will be shut off to vehicular traffic starting on Monday, September 10, and it is expected to remain closed until the end of October while workers rebuild the bridge’s retaining walls and remove the temporary support structure, according to Salvatore Arena, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The work is part of a $26.2 million project undertaken by the MTA to repair the North Road train overpass, as well as the Montauk Highway and Shinnecock Canal overpasses. North Road, which connects Montauk Highway and Sunrise Highway, also was closed in January and reopened just before Memorial Day.
Mr. Arena said this week that the completion date for all three projects is October 31. He added that “on most of these projects, we tend to finish early anyway.”
Mr. Neely said he worked with the MTA to make sure that North Road would be open during the busy summer months and noted that the upcoming closure is not a surprise.
“It’s a big project,” he said, adding that the bridge is around 100 years old and in disrepair. “The good news is we’re not going to have to worry about it again for another 100 years.”
When it announced the projects last September, the MTA said the work would increase the lifespans of the three bridges by 35 to 40 years, and that all of the work would be finished by 2013. The Montauk Highway and North Road bridges each will be raised 5 inches to accommodate larger buses and trucks, while all three structures are being sandblasted, waterproofed and repainted.
Ongoing work at the Montauk Highway bridge has resulted in sporadic single-lane closures over the past several months that will continue throughout September and October, according to Mr. Arena, while the Shinnecock Canal bridge has not required any closures.
Though he said drivers should not be greatly inconvenienced by the North Road closure, because the detour on Peconic Road is about a half mile to the east, Mr. Neely said he is sympathetic to the burden it will place on the Hampton Bays School District, which began classes this week.
John Moran, the school district’s director of safety and transportation, said he expects the pending closure to cost the district approximately $35,000. He explained that school officials must hire three additional buses to ensure that the students who live in the area get to class on time. The district was forced to spend $50,000 on extra buses for five months last school year to transport the 51 students who live in the area.
The MTA has not reimbursed the district for those additional costs and has no plans to do so, according to Hampton Bays Superintendent of Schools Lars Clemensen. He added that the district only learned of the latest road closure when it was mentioned in passing at a Hampton Bays Civic Association meeting in late August.
Mike Brenner, the project manager at Conti of New York, the New Jersey company contracted to complete the work on the three bridges, declined to comment on the situation when reached this week. He referred all questions to his company’s marketing department, which did not return calls seeking comment.
“I have all my permits—that’s where I’d like to leave it,” Mr. Brenner said.
