DOVER, Wis. — Racine County residents living near a County Highway BD bridge closure are seeing visible progress this week, five months after the road shut down in mid-April.
The closure has forced detours for residents along the route, despite the root of the issue being a single bridge.
Watch the video below to hear from impacted residents:
Larry Neau lives directly next to the impacted bridge, now under construction. He remembers when the culvert failure first happened in April.
"I was watching TV and I saw the lights from the cops that showed up and then the county workers that came and put barricades across it," Neau said.
The closure has tripled the time it takes Neau to reach nearby destinations.
"To get to the dump, it used to take me about one minute, or two minutes, I should say," Neau said.
Now, it takes about seven, and while it's a minor inconvenience, he's not alone.
John Korndoerfer, a Town of Dover resident who lives on the north side of Eagle Lake, said the closure cuts off a direct route to Highway 11.
He said it impacts his daily life "quite a bit."
"That's kind of the way that I would go to visit my grandson. That's where the local gas stations are. There's some restaurants and other businesses over there that now we have to detour and either go to the east or to the west to go around," Korndoerfer said.
Residents have also raised concerns about longer emergency vehicle response times.
Neau said he recently witnessed emergency crews responding to an incident at the closure itself.
"And you could hear the ambulance go all the way past and all the way around," Neau said.
"They have to go all the way around and add another five or 10 minutes to their drive," Korndoerfer said.
In a Facebook post, the county said while progress hasn't been visible over the past five months, work completed ahead of this week included "redesigning the culvert, utility coordination, environmental and wetland review, permitting, and coordination with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and other agencies."
Manufacturing the replacement culvert, which is "approximately 10 feet tall, 7½ feet wide and 109 feet long" took four weeks.
The county described the project as "not a routine road repair," noting that similar projects can take up to two years in some cases.
Korndoerfer said residents were caught off guard by the timeline.
"We kind of thought that it'd be fixed within a couple of weeks," Korndoerfer said.
He also said the county could do more to keep residents informed.
"We haven't really known what's been going on," he said.
Neau, meanwhile, has found a silver lining.
"There's been no traffic, so it's been really nice and quiet," Neau said.
Weather permitting, the bridge could reopen to traffic by mid-November, according to the county.
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.
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