Bastrop County works on fix for flood-damaged road,
Temporary two-lane dirt road will be ready this week.
Bastrop County residents will soon be able to drive both ways across flood-damaged Shiloh Road, following a recent heated meeting between residents and county officials.
For the past four months, those living in and traveling through the Shiloh community, west of Bastrop and south of Texas 71, have been unable to drive across the Shiloh Road bridge near Texas 304 after record-breaking rainfall during the Memorial Day floods left a deep crater in the roadway. Officials now say a temporary two-lane dirt road will allow cars to pass through again as soon as by the end of this week.
Shiloh Road was one of three bridges throughout the county that were washed out during the storm. County officials have been working with Federal Emergency Management Agency workers to put in place repair plans since the county was approved for federal public assistance. In total, officials have identified 700 sites on county roadways that need fixes and estimate the total costs of flood-related damages to be upward of $5 million.
At least 30 residents packed into the Shiloh Community Center on Sept. 29 to get some answers from Bastrop County Judge Paul Pape, Precinct 1 Commissioner Willie Piña and Emergency Management coordinator Mike Fisher.
Pape, Piña and Fisher laid out a plan for a temporary fix: a single-lane passage over the damaged bridge followed about seven months later by a permanently repaired bridge to mitigate future flooding.
The meeting devolved into shouting at times, with community members voicing concerns that forcing cars to take turns crossing on a one-lane temporary road would be too dangerous because drivers often speed on the road; county officials, however, said it would be the only way to create a way to pass soon.
“I know that a lot of us have been communicating to you — we were asking for you all to communicate with us about the repairs, not give us a temporary fix that we do not want,” Bernie Jackson said during the meeting. Jackson is the pastor of Trinity Zion Ministries, which is located just down the road from the damaged bridge.
But much of the back-and-forth during the meeting proved to be moot because when Pape, Fisher and Piña touched base with the county engineer a day after the public meeting, they learned a two-lane fix would, in fact, be possible. Piña said he hopes the two-lane temporary repairs will be in place by the end of this week.
FEMA has estimated the total cost of the more permanent repairs to the road, which will include putting in more drainage pipes to prevent the road from washing away again, at about $150,000, Fisher said. But the cost will not be determined until the project goes out for bids early next year.