Plotting the Course For a New Road to Protect it From Rising Waters
In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, US-2 is a scenic highway that travels from Ironwood, down along the coast of Lake Michigan to St. Ignace.
The Cut River Bridge is located along US-2, east of Epoufette, in Mackinac County. In recent years, the rising waters of Lake Michigan have threatened the land beneath the roadway that leads up to the western approach of the bridge. Sinkholes related to the area’s geography had begun appearing and the US-2 roadway is settling along that area, making it hazardous.
Rather than repair the road, the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) decided to relocate 1.4 miles of US-2 west of the Cut River Bridge to improve the long-term safety and mobility of the corridor.
Spicer Group survey total station near the Cut River Bridge.
Spicer Group was hired by MDOT to complete a design survey of the area where the road would be relocated to. A design survey is performed by land surveyors in our Survey Services Group to gather existing site conditions and information, such as three-dimensional terrain information (topography), area features, and the location and documentation of any existing improvements on the project’s proposed site.
Typically, this would include buildings, visible infrastructure, and roadways. On this project, however, the terrain was untouched forest land. Surveyor field crews from Spicer Group set their primary control points and benchmarks for reference purposes, obtained existing elevations, surveyed historic property corners and government corners to develop the legal right of way, and surveyed the terrain through the relocation area.
MDOT had a general location of where they wanted the roadway to go, Spicer Group Survey Crew Chief Ed Szczepanski said. The agency gave a centerline determination and required the design survey to include everything within a certain amount of feet on each side of that centerline.
“For this project, instead of focusing on the mapping of an existing road, to measure for the relocation of the road, we had to clear lines through the woods at 50-foot intervals for about a mile and a half,” Spicer Group Survey Crew Chief Lance Koko said. “Some of these lines were 400 to 500 feet from the existing road edge.”
Szczepanski and Koko spent a month surveying the property. At some points, they had to use chainsaws to cut their way back in to reach specific destinations.
Also, on a typical road project, surveyors deal with the challenges of traffic and working within a roadway. For this project, there was no traffic due to US-2 being closed for the inspection of the Cut River Bridge.
“There also isn’t normally such awesome scenery,” Koko said. “It was all untouched woods.”
While recovering section corners to help determine information on the historical legal alignment for the property, the surveyors had to hike down nearly-vertical coastline along Lake Michigan to reach the government section corners.
“We then had to slug through cedar swamps to find these corners,” Szczepanski said. “It was a really great job.”
Spicer Group Survey Crew Chief Lance Koko gathering survey data along US-2 in Mackinac County.
Once it was complete, the design survey was then used by engineers to determine all the controlling elements to be used as the basis for the project design of the new path and alignment for the relocated roadway.
The 1.4-mile portion of the US-2 highway will be moved about 350 feet north of its current location. The project began at the end of April this year. The project is estimated to cost $3.2 million.
Project Rendering. Photo Credit: MDOT Superior Region Design Team.