Dufort Road work nears end

Bonner County residents have been waiting patiently — for the most part — for Dufort Road to reopen and their patience is finally about to pay off.

A culvert replacement project, prompted by the collapse of the previous culvert, is nearly finished and a representative from the county’s Road and Bridge department said the road should reopen late next week if everything goes well.

The culvert has been installed and crews are working to remove a dam around the worksite that drained the water so construction could be completed.

“It will be all hands on deck and the crews will be working through the weekend to get the road built and up and running,” Priscilla Tanner, Road and Bridge administration assistant, said.

While Road and Bridge crews have been working their hardest to get the road reopened, Tanner said multiple setbacks have kept it closed for much longer than they had hoped or anticipated. As a result, it’s not certain whether the road will reopen next week. However, Tanner said that if all else goes according to plan, residents can expect things back to normal by next weekend.

Should more speed bumps arise, however, the road could remain closed a while longer. Road and Bridge crew asked residents to continue to be patient as they work to sort through those as fast as possible, should more issues occur.

“They have run into and worked through multiple setbacks throughout the whole situation,” Tanner said. “As such, there is not a set date that it will be back up and running but we are hopeful to have it open within the next week or so at the latest.”

The culvert failed in early June, shutting the roadway in the 5700 block of Dufort Road and prompting the county to declare a state of emergency to fix the roadway. The collapse if roughly where the Cocolalla Slough goes out into the river, Road and Bridge officials previously said.

When the 12-foot by 80-foot pipe gave out, Road and Bridge officials previously said the road bed surrounding the culvert collapsed underneath, leaving roughly a 2-foot gap between the asphalt layer and the road base below.

Traffic has been rerouted around the site since the June 4 collapse with a "hard closure" at the intersection of Lakeshore Drive and Dufort Road on the east side, and Jewel Lake and Dufort roads on the west side.