Posted on December 17, 2018
The much-anticipated One Lake Project is being panned by state transportation officials, in large part, because they don’t have enough information to support it.
The Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT) recently issued a letter to the Rankin-Hinds Pearl River Flood and Drainage Control District that decries One Lake, citing its potential impact on nine bridges that run across the Pearl River.
The letter was mailed to the district on September 5, to be included among thousands of public comments submitted on the project’s draft economic and environmental feasibility studies.
“The draft environmental study we saw did not have the engineering detail in it we needed to say it wouldn’t affect our bridges,” Central District Transportation Commissioner Dick Hall said. “We were put in a position where we had to give our ruling, one way or the other. Based on what we had, we couldn’t say it would be a safe project.”
Rankin-Hinds Attorney Keith Turner said the district will provide MDOT with additional information on the bridges by the first of the year.
“We’re preparing a new supplement for them right now,” he said. “We told (MDOT) we would get the new material to them by the first of the year.”
Turner said engineers hadn’t had a chance to respond to MDOT’s concerns prior to the public comment deadline.
“We’re not a huge team with hundreds of people working on this project,” he said. “It’s a smaller team, and we are working to respond to agency comments and public comments and doing edits.”
In all, about 3,000 public comments were submitted, including many from environmental groups opposed to the project.
The roughly $355 million project would include building a large lake on the Pearl River between Hinds and Rankin counties, from north of Lakeland Drive to south of I-20 near Richland. In all, nine bridges would be impacted by the development, according to the MDOT letter.
Hall said engineers within the department reviewed the plans prior to MDOT Executive Director Melinda McGrath submitting the letter.
The last day to submit a public comment on the project was September 6. The study was released for review earlier this summer.
“Our engineers looked at what was given to them, and what was given to them was not sufficient,” Hall said. “It does not protect the pilings. If you’re going to dredge it, where are you going to dredge it? How close are you going to get to the bridges?”
To create the lake, the river would be dredged and widened. Dredged materials would then be used to create additional shorelines and islands, which could be set aside for economic development and recreational purposes.
In the letter, McGrath said any dredging under the bridges would reduce the structures’ capacity to handle traffic, and any dredging activities done upstream or downstream of the bridges could cause a “sudden collapse due to (the) sudden loss of non-dredged material.”
Bridges that could be impacted run along some of the busiest roadways in the state: Lakeland Drive, I-20, I-55 North and U.S.80.
I-55 at the Pearl River averages around 112,000 vehicles a day, while I-20 at the river averages around 108,000 vehicles a day, according to MDOT traffic counts. Around 61,000 vehicles travel over the Pearl River at Lakeland each day, while around 14,000 use Highway 80.
Opponents, including the Mississippi Sierra Club, say bridge problems could raise the cost of the project by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Turner said engineers did take the bridges into account when crafting the project.
“We already have in our budget the cost necessary to protect those bridges,” he said. “We knew it would have to be addressed. It’s all part of the engineers’ original cost estimates.”
The study is being sponsored by Rankin-Hinds and funded by donations to the Pearl River Vision Foundation. The engineering team is led by Mendrop Engineering Services of Flowood.
Source: The NorthsideSUN
