A major road closure is now in effect in southern Martin County, where the bridge at Southeast County Line Road is closed for a year-long reconstruction project.<\/p>\n
The detour could add several minutes to daily drives, so officials are urging commuters to plan ahead or find an alternate route.<\/p>\n
George May lives just off Southeast County Line Road, where a road block is now notifying drivers to turn around.<\/p>\n
“It’ll be inconvenient, for sure. People commuting to work and people that live in little club,” May said.<\/p>\n
May said the road closure is going to take some getting used to.<\/p>\n
“I already drive over an hour to work everyday. It’ll probably add about 20 minutes to my commute,” May said.<\/p>\n
Martin County says the bridge will be closed for a year, with a lot of work ahead.<\/p>\n
“There are a lot of utilities ther,” Mark Aveni, Martin County public works deputy director, said. “There’s a lot of coordination that needs to occur. We’re removing a pedestrian bridge and we’re going to repurpose that somewhere else and unfortunately these things just take time.” <\/p>\n
Despite the closure, residents say they’re glad to see the investment.<\/p>\n
“There were large cracks under the bridge. It was deteriorating,” May said.<\/p>\n
“It’s a little bit of an inconvenience but I’m happy for that \u2014 to have a new bridge and have better infrastructure in the area,” Daniel Von said.<\/p>\n
Six of the project’s $7 million price tag is covered by state and federal grants. The new bridge will be two feet higher and built to be safer and more resilient.<\/p>\n
“We’re replacing it with a very resilient type of rebar that’s going to be safer. There is a very sharp curve before that bridge, we’re going to totally eliminate that and soften the curve. It’ll also be much safer for pedestrians,” Aveni said.<\/p>\n
Residents are now hoping the project will go on without delays.<\/p>\n
“I’m fine with it as long as they keep the project on schedule,” May said.<\/p>\n
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A major road closure is now in effect in southern Martin County, where the bridge at Southeast County…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":433792,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[171,173,172],"class_list":["post-433791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-port-st-lucie","tag-port-st-lucie","tag-port-st-lucie-headlines","tag-port-st-lucie-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}