After last week’s 7.0 temblor, three spots on the Kenai Spur Highway in Nikiski suffered cracks to varying extent at mileposts 19, 35 and 37. But, without any road-building currently active on the Central Peninsula, some repairs will remain gravel for the winter for a lack of asphalt.
Shannon McCarthy, a DOT spokeswoman in Anchorage says the repairs here were effected by the DOT’s peninsula maintenance crew.
“The maintenance staff on the Kenai, I believe it was the Soldotna crew, went out there and they were able to grind up the affected areas and level them and reopen the road. But they’ll have to wait until summer, spring or summer until they can fire up their paving operation and get those completed.”
She said the repair work was done by late Saturday, just a day after the quake created the damage.
After any major seismic event, McCarthy said, initial infrastructure inspections are made by maintenance crews, and then the bridges are followed up by structural engineers.
“They arrived here the night of Nov. 30th, and they finished their inspections in the Mat-Su, Anchorage, Eagle River and down south of Portage, they finished those inspections Wednesday morning, and then they went on to the Kenai.”
Fortunately, none of the bridges in Southcentral suffered any damage.
“There’s always some movement. Bridges essentially behaved like we expected them to. There are expansion joints built into them, so they can move a little bit, as opposed to breaking.”
