Storm-damaged sections East Zayante Road in Felton and Nelson Road in Scotts Valley are currently under construction, and are scheduled to reach completion by the end of this year, say county officials.
Both construction projects are the result of massive storms that hit Santa Cruz County in 2006 and 2011, said Santa Cruz County Public Works Assistant Director Steve Wiesner.
“These are welcomed reconstruction projects that go back as far as 2006 storms,” said Fifth District Supervisor Bruce McPherson, “which goes to show you that sometimes it takes a long time to get these things rebuilt from a natural disaster, but they are welcomed when they are done.”
The East Zayante project is located at mile marker 6.22 and is expected to be finished and open to the public just before Thanksgiving on Nov. 21 — weather permitting, said Wiesner.
Presently, there are traffic delays up to a half-hour at a time during the day, with intermittent full road closures to perform certain operations.
This FEMA-funded project will restore the road to its previous state with improvements to the culvert that was damaged in a 2006 storm. The new culvert will allow clean water flow and a more fish-friendly habitat, said McPherson.
“Interestingly enough, it’s the very last project of somewhere between 45 and 50 projects that we had to complete that were a result of the storms that happened in 2006,” said Wiesner. “This is the very last one from those events.”
Nelson Road is a more recent construction project created by a 2011 storm that triggered a massive rock slide that completely covered the roadway.
“We are building a new road with a wall to hold back a good amount of the rock material that came down that is turning into sand now,” said John Presleigh, director of the Santa Cruz County Department of Public Works.
The new stretch of road is being constructed at mile post 2.0 and a bypass road has been put in place so there are no traffic delays, said Wiesner.
Anticipated completion time for the new road is Dec. 19, but there will be more construction next summer to remove the bypass road.
“The week of March 20 (2011), there was massive amounts of rain that came down that caused somewhere between 15 and 20 million dollars’ worth of damage to county roads,” Wiesner said. “The Nelson Road site in particular was the biggest storm damage site … it was massive, one of the bigger ones we have seen in the county.”
Presleigh said that the cost of construction for the Nelson Road project is about $740,000 and will be performed by Reber Construction, while East Zayante’s will cost approximately $400,000 with Granite Construction as the contractor.
“To repair these roadways that have been damaged by natural storms and disasters takes a lot of time, but I really welcome them, as I know the people of the San Lorenzo Valley do when they finally come about and they do repair them,” McPherson said.
