Helen Orendain, a Missoula attorney, stands to lose a slice of hillside property if it is. She's dogged in her pursuit for proof of why a million-dollar excavation is necessary.
“It's like using a sledgehammer when a flyswatter will do,” Orendain told two MDT officials and Missoula County Commissioner Bill Carey at a meeting in her home Monday.
“Those of us who've been watching this wonder if we're under siege by a government that wants to use Blue Mountain Road as a de facto western bypass,” she said. “This might be something that's a larger picture, but maybe not. I hope not.”
“There's no way in the world we'd ever be able to afford a bypass out here,” Carey assured a group of neighbors, state Sen. Dave Wanzenried and Karolin Loendorft, campaign manager for state Rep. Bill Nooney, all of whom also attended the meeting.
There has been talk in the past 10 years about another bypass west of Reserve Street, allowed Dwane Kailey, MDT's district administrator in Missoula. But it has focused on Tower Street, a mile or more east of Blue Mountain Road. And it was deemed unfeasible nine years ago because it wouldn't divert enough vehicles off Reserve Street.
“This is a ballpark figure, and I might be off by several digits, but to do something like that on Blue Mountain Road would be $100 million. At least,” Kailey said.
Orendain and neighbors from the Target Range and O'Brien Creek homeowners associations have kept wary eyes on Blue Mountain Road for years, since the idea was broached of a bridge across the Bitterroot River to connect it to Lower Miller Creek.
Orendain, who has lived in the house for 13 years and fought other road battles with the county and state, helped lead opposition to the bridge plan. The environmental impact statement for the Miller Creek project ultimately settled on options other than building a bridge.
But a study that was part of the EIS was the genesis of the debate on Orendain's corner, Kailey told the group Monday.
The state has a federal fund of roughly $10 million to address accident-prone stretches of road, even if it's a county road such as Blue Mountain. Kailey showed the neighbors an updated map compiled in the EIS study of accidents that have occurred in the area since 2000. The biggest cluster was at the corner just south of the intersections of Blue Mountain, O'Brien Creek, Big Flat and River Pines roads - and immediately downslope from Orendain's home.
“This was one curve on that road that did have an accident history and warranted mitigation,” Kailey said.
Two years ago, Orendain and her daughter Buffy returned from a trip to Seattle to an alarming sight.
“My whole yard was peppered with red flags,” Orendain said.
Surveyors from HDR Engineering were busy marking the corner. Kailey called it a miscommunication. The information had been mailed to Orendain when she was out of town.
“Our consultants thought they had captured right of entry. They didn't,” said Kailey. “We pulled them off as soon as Helen called us.”
Orendain was upset by the engineers' intentions.
“They wanted to really carve into my hill, within 30 feet of my deck,” Orendain said.
That stirred her enough to do some research, which she thought effectively derailed the project. She found that the black-and-yellow chevrons - those V-shaped warnings intended to scream “Turn this way now!” to oncoming drivers - had significantly cut down the accident rate at the corner since their installation in December 2001.
In the two years before that, there were 17 accidents at the curve. In the ensuing two years, the number dropped to five and, in the next two, just four. None involved fatalities.
Kailey and Duane Williams, the state transportation department's traffic safety bureau chief, revealed the latest accident figures for 2006 and 2007 on Monday. There were only two accidents on the corner, both in '07 and both attributable in part to poor road conditions.
“Putting up those chevrons seemed to do a tremendous amount to address the problem,” said Anne Rupkalvis of the Target Range Homeowners Association. “Now if you just put up a guardrail and some illumination, it could be a relatively insignificant financial fix.”
“We may be looking at a problem that doesn't exist any more,” agreed George Knapp, who lives near the troublesome corner.
Orendain complained the $1 million set aside to reconstruct the corner didn't even take into account the cost of a suggested retaining wall. Nor did it cover soil tests to determine if the cut in the hillside would result in a landslide.
MDT's less costly alternatives to address the corner include enhanced signing and a channelized median. The neighbors said keeping speed limits low is a key - not raising them, as the state's preferred proposal seems to suggest.
If cars can travel faster around the corner, doesn't that make the intersection nearby a more dangerous spot? wondered Chris Hopwood.
“It seems like you're going to take the small problem you've got (at the corner) and transfer it to a bigger range of accidents down the road,” Hopwood said. “Have you looked at what that would do at the interchange?”
“We haven't,” Williams said. “We could definitely look at that.”
Carey seemed to agree that the most costly alternative of reconstruction isn't the best one.
“From what I've heard, and I'm speaking solely for myself, it doesn't seem to me this will rise to a level of doing it,” he said.
The ultimate decision will be up to him and his fellow commissioners.
Money saved on a less expensive solution won't go to waste, Williams said. It will be diverted to another road safety project on MDT's list, though not necessarily in Missoula County.
Carey said a public hearing will be held that could generate further ideas. He'll ask public works director Greg Robertson to come up with a recommendation, “hopefully sooner rather than later.”
“Where we're sitting is, we've provided the alternatives back to the county,” said Kailey. “It's their road. It's their accidents. It's their decision as to how they want to proceed. But we do believe the best fix is the reconstruction.”
Kailey deemed Monday's meeting a success.
“I think it went well, because we heard what the landowners had to say and their concerns, and the county was here to hear their concerns,” he said. “What more can you ask for? Did we walk out of here all hand in hand and everything's great? No. But in today's society, that doesn't happen a whole lot.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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Andrew Hunt wrote on Oct 9, 2008 1:09 PM: