The long wait on Forrest Road could see progress soon

As folks who must use Forrest Road near the Bull Creek and Cooper Creek bridges can attest, the projects to replace or repair those bridges can be accurately described as a dumpster fire, and I say that with apologies to dumpster fires everywhere.

The work has been going on at the Bull Creek crossing for a few years, but at least one side of the bridge is more or less completed and is open. So two-way traffic keeps flowing, although through a two-lane bottleneck. And it has been that way for over a year, with construction on the remaining half all but halted by utility problems. First, there was an unforeseen water problem that required the bridge to be redesigned, but that was taken care of.

Then they realized that a major AT&T line ran through there and again work had to halt while the phone company reroutes thousands of customer lines and converts them from the old copper wire to fiber optic. That is apparently a long, labor-intensive task.

Donna Newman, director of engineering for the city, said AT&T is holding up work on both the Bull Creek Bridge, and more importantly on the Cooper Creek Bridge a little west of Bull Creek. That project has closed down Forrest completely and is forcing traffic onto a two-mile detour over to Macon Road and back.

“We’re waiting on AT&T,” Newman said. “We’ve been waiting a long time.”

So have a lot of motorists. According to the city’s traffic map, 10,000-15,000 cars a day use Forrest Road in that area. And if you’ve tried to use it around morning or evening rush hours, you’ll agree that it seems all of them are there at once.

Newman said that once AT&T gets done with their work at Cooper Creek, it should only take the city about a month to get traffic flowing again.

I called Terry Smith, a spokesman for AT&T, to find out when they might be wrapped up at both sites.

Smith told me the phone company has had people working on the Bull Creek project six days a week, 12 hours a day trying to get it completed. When I mentioned that people tell me they aren’t seeing any work being done at the site, he explained that the rerouting isn’t done at the site but at other locations where the lines are being rerouted. So just because you don’t see AT&T trucks and guys with AT&T hardhats there, it doesn’t mean the work isn’t going on.

Smith said he couldn’t give me a definitive time when the Bull Creek bridge part would be done, but that they hope it will be by the end of the summer.

But he did give me some good news. He said they have determined that they don’t have to do any rerouting at Cooper Creek, the one that’s completely closed and causing the major headaches. He said they’ve been able to “wrap” the phone cables there to protect them and that they’ve just finished with that. So, if that’s the case, and if the bridge contractors can get back on the job, then Forrest Road may be reopening soon.

We will see.

But that won’t mean Bull Creek can get back under way yet. We’ll keep you posted on that.

This story was originally published May 15, 2016 at 9:44 PM with the headline "The long wait on Forrest Road could see progress soon."