Seward Highway Road Closure this Weekend!

[UPDATE, Tuesday noon: The road work was NOT completed at 5am Monday as scheduled. People were told it could be 5pm or later. The following is now up on the State site, saying the road is now open:

Open To Traffic - Seward Highway

Seward Highway: at Falls Creek Bridge road open to traffic, short delays -- look out for flaggers last updated today [Tuesday, April 28] at 11:18 AM]

One of the visitors to the Indigenous Peoples Summit told me last night he wanted to go to Seward Saturday before he left for home. Wanted to see a bit of Alaska. But the tour agency said the road was closed. After I thought about that a while, I thought, "They can't close the road all day. They can't shut the people of Seward off from the world like that." So today I emailed a friend in Seward to check. After that I thought, "Why didn't you just google?" (Cause it was an excuse to say hi to my friend probably.) So I googled and got this:

Alert - Seward Highway

Seward Highway: from Milepost 22 to Falls Creek Bridge delays, lane closed due to road construction work — until May 30 Comment: PLEASE NOTE: ROAD CLOSURE - The Seward Highway will be closed at Milepost 24.8 - Falls Creek this coming Friday, April 24th at 10:00 PM until Monday, April 27th at 5:00 AM. All construction is scheduled to be completed by Saturday, May 30th. For more information you may contact either DOT at 907-269-0450 or Tal Maxwell, the project engineer, at 907-632-2729 or the contractor at 907-288-6700.. Thank you. last updated yesterday at 4:29 PM

Read that. What does that mean to you? I see "delays, lane closed..." But then it says "will be closed at Milepost 24.8...Friday...until Monday."

Then I got this back from my friend in Seward:

Crazy as it sounds, DOT is actually closing the road on Friday at 10 pm and not re-opening it until Monday morning at 5 am. It is unbelievable. They have three bridges that need major work, and the intent is to place temporary bridges on two of them. Sadly, DOT did not include the community in planning for the closure, so it took us all by surprise. We found out about 4 weeks ago and have been scrambling to address the issue. Lots of businesses have had to cancel bookings which had been booked a year or more in advance.

OK, I know there were some serious bridge problems, and making an extra lane over water in the narrow canyon could be tricky. And I'm sure they can get more work done if they don't have to let cars go by every hour or less. It's a trade off and probably it would cost a lot more to pick an option that lets people use the road. Or maybe it would cost a lot more in terms of imagination and creativity - how about a ferry on the lake? When I was on a bus in Nepal in another lifetime, we came to a huge rock slide. We were simply told to climb over the rocks and there was the bus coming the other way. The passengers just traded buses which gingerly turned around on the narrow mountain road. Isn't there a railroad bridge there? Why not work with the railroad for some extra trains that day, or at least a shuttle car over the railroad bridge. People could arrange to swap cars or there could be shuttle busses. There are lots of options if we put our heads together. It could even be fun. But cutting off a town of about 3000 plus everyone else that lives south of Moose Pass for a whole weekend seems pretty extreme.