The latest on Austin Streeet in Seguin

UPDATE: upcoming work involving closures has been pushed until after New Years due to the wet weather forecast. New work schedule will be announced early January.

If you're talking with our guys on the project please don't mention the word inlet - it's become profanity of on this project. Whether the issue be with fabrication or installation, drain inlets have been a single consistent challenge on this project.
Because of some of these challenges on the south end of the project we are going to close - completely - North Austin between Seideman and Railroad. This will allow Curran to reconstruct the road and reposition some of the inlets in the area, correcting the issues causing problems for us right now.
Oh, yeah ... it would be helpful to know the timeframe of that full closure. Well, we plan to take advantage of the school holiday so we won't need to reroute Seguin ISD school buses. Curran will shut things down the morning of Monday, December 18 and will reopen the road by close of business Friday, December 22.
If we tried to do this work without the full closure we'd end up trying to finish it out with weekend closures through the month of January. This more aggressive approach allows us to save some time on the work and get down to business.
Back in October we said we'd be all done with one-way traffic on this job forever. We're still on pace to make good on that promise. Curran is laying asphalt on the northbound side of the road and has just a couple of inches remaining before we can swap lanes over and work on the southbound side.
All told we're eying a completion date in early 2019. Yes, that's about six months after we had initially expected. Delays involving those cursed inlets and some box culverts have pushed work back and contributed to some fairly significant delays on work.
And now ... time for some quick looks at the job:


Paving crews lay asphalt base for the new road. The elevation difference between the old road and new road should be fairly evident; the old road surface is about even with the workers' waistline as they lay asphalt.

This stretch of northbound Austin Street still needs a good two inches of asphalt before it's ready for traffic.

Box culverts and inlets continue to be a challenge on the project, but the challenge is being met by project staff head-on.



Inlet woes continue to plague the job, but TxDOT staff has worked with Curran to develop workable solutions and get this job finished with relative speed.