The Minnesota Department of Transportation announced Tuesday that it will rebuild the flood-damaged section of Minnesota Highway 210 that has been closed since the June 2012 deluge.
The department had been considering options that included not rebuilding the road, which would have left a dead-end near the Jay Cooke State Park entrance.
But the agency said support for rebuilding the road and keeping it open to through traffic was by far the most popular option, based on public input.
Work will begin in the summer of 2015 on the two-mile section of roadway and should take about a year to complete.
The project, which doesn’t yet have a price tag, will be funded with 80 percent federal emergency funds and 20 percent state emergency funds, which can only be used on emergency repair projects.
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“We will have a better idea of how much the project will cost later this year,” said Todd Campbell, program delivery engineer for MNDOT.
Of the 1,200 public surveys on the project that were completed, the vast majority of people wanted to see Highway 210 rebuilt. The closed stretch of roadway was heavily damaged on June 19, 2012, when a flood caused landslides that endangered the safety of the embankments that support the roadway and the slopes above it. Then stream flows, which exceeded the capacity of the culverts, caused the roadway to wash out.
