3-Month Road Construction Project Still Not Done Almost 2 Years Later
DFW AIRPORT (1080 KRLD) - If you've been looking to take Glade Road, between Highway 360 and Airfield Drive, you've undoubtedly been greeted by barricades.
In November of 2015, the Euless Police Department posted on its Facebook page that the road would be closed for necessary repairs, with an estimated closure of three months. Here we are in August of 2017 -- and it's still closed.
Drivers like Terry Mabry are left in the dark. "I inquired from the Euless Police Department why the road was still closed," says Mabry, who lives in North Richland Hills, "and they had no information as to why it was still closed."
That stretch of Glade Road is on Dallas Fort Worth International Airport property; and thus, the airport is responsible for its maintenance.
DFW spokesman David Magana says the heavy rains in 2015 made the road unsafe. "Late in that year, as we were doing a routine inspection, one of our engineers discovered that many of the supports had come loose or had . . . looked like they were inadequate for what was happening there on the bridge"
So the airport asked the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) to take a look. "The next day, TxDOT came out, inspected it themselves and said, 'Yeah, we've got to close this right now," Magana says.
Magana points out that to start with, the bridges were never designed for modern traffic.
"The bridges that are down there were actually dating back to the 1930s," says Magana. "And there were some placards down there that indicated that these were built during the Works Progress Administration during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency."
Magana expects the road to reopen sometime in September.
But don't get too comfortable -- In 2020, that same stretch will be closed yet again as crews completely rebuild it. "We're going to build a brand new single-lane road from 360 over to West Airfield, with a concrete bridge fully suited to modern standards and modern traffic," says Magana.
And unlike with the current repairs, the airport and TxDOT will be able to do all the routine pre-planning before starting that project. As a result, Magana expects that closure to last a few months instead of almost two years.
As for the current closure, drivers like Mabry say it can't end soon enough. "It's inconvenient, it shouldn't have taken this long, but it did," he says.
