BEND, OR -- The northeast Bend intersection of Neff Road and Purcell Boulevard that has been closed since February was supposed to reopen in August. It should be open early next month.
“The striping, which should be going down this week, we have this signage that needs to get installed and then we need to get the signal poles physically checked out. We have ODOT coming out on November 28th to do the testing and the programming of the signals to make sure they work properly. We should be able to open this thing up to traffic probably the first week in December. So, December 4th is a Monday and then we would continue to monitor the signal under traffic,” Ryan Oster, the city’s engineering director, says work was slowed by old utility lines. “We ran into a lot of unmapped conflicts out in the field. We just had to take an extra level of precaution there. Getting 20 feet down to build a retaining wall, we ran into two different levels of utilities, and a lot of those older ones were just not mapped because they just didn't do it back in the day”, he said, which caused some challenges, “When you run into a new conflict every day, you've got to kind of slow down and ‘ok, if we tear this up, we're not cutting power to the hospital, are we?’ Unfortunately, it added a couple of months to the project. But yeah, we did that to ensure that we weren't going to critically damage any of the infrastructure out there and make sure we got this thing built right. “
The Purcell extension, north of Neff Road, should also open around that first week of December.
