I-69 goes west from the interchange with Ind. 37. Staff photo by Jeremy Hogan
Staff graphic by Stewart Moon
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It’s the end of 2014 and Section 4 of Interstate 69 is nowhere near being done.
Where the interstate is supposed to connect to Ind. 37, light poles stand on the edges of a dirt path. Where the highway is supposed to cross over Rockport Road, metal beams stick up into the sky with nothing on top of them. And Harmony Road, which is supposed to cross over the interstate, has a gap in it so large the trucks in the valley below look like toys.
With much of the route still unpaved, it might seem like construction crews have just been pushing dirt around for the past few months. That’s actually not too far from the truth, but it’s a little more complicated than simply digging and dumping.
When Sections 1 through 3 were opened to traffic at the end of 2012, the Indiana Department of Transportation still expected Section 4 to be finished by December of this year.
“It wasn’t an unrealistic goal,” said Chriss Jobe, construction area engineer for Section 4. “But it was aggressive.”
So was the goal for the first three sections, but Mother Nature was a little more cooperative. A historic drought and a mild winter allowed construction to stay on schedule. Crews on Section 4, the 27-mile stretch from Naval Surface Activity Crane to Bloomington, had to cope with an exceptionally wet spring in 2013 followed by some of the coldest temperatures the area has seen in two decades that winter. This year has also been pretty wet, and all that moisture makes building a highway difficult.
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