Sebastopol tears up Bodega Avenue as Highway 12 bridge project nears completion

Driving into Sebastopol from the east is getting easier by the day, now that workers are wrapping up a two-year project replacing the Highway 12 bridge that spans the Laguna de Santa Rosa at the eastern entrance to the city.

But it will be slow-going on the other side of the town center for the next week or so, as crews tackle reconstruction of a busy intersection where traffic often backs up, even in the best of times.

The road surface at Bodega Avenue and High Street, the intersection where the Sebastopol library sits, has long been buckled and cracked, the result of asphalt that was laid directly on top of the dirt many decades ago, City Engineer Joe Gaffney said.

Construction crews started tearing up the surface Wednesday, excavating about 30 inches of soil underneath and filling the space with base rock to help shore up the new pavement once it’s laid over top next week.

But that’s going to require restricting traffic through the area and rerouting westbound motorists around the roadwork via Jewell Avenue, according to Sean Durenberger, project manager for Petaluma-based Team Ghilotti, which is going the estimated $143,000 job.

Eastbound traffic, which will be kept on Bodega Avenue, will nonetheless be shifted side-to-side while work proceeds.

The detours and delays will have an impact, Gaffney said.

“It’s a pretty busy arterial because it serves a big area out west of Sebastopol,” he said.

Area motorists are accustomed to a certain amount of disruption going through town.

The $9 million Highway 12 bridge project under way since June 2015 has caused significant delays on the highway, with traffic often backed up some distance from the city, as motorists slow to navigate narrow, shifting lanes through the construction zone.

The existing bridge was built in 1921 and widened in 1949. Routine inspections in 2002 revealed underwater scouring that had eroded the structural supports and put the integrity of the bridge at risk, requiring replacement.

Constructions workers had to take great pains to avoid impacts to the sensitive Laguna habitat, a 14-mile-long freshwater wetland complex that drains a 250-square-mile watershed on the Santa Rosa Plain.

Workers built one side of the new bridge each of the two years, working in part from scaffolding erected over the waterway on each side. After both spans were constructed, they filled in the middle portion and later added 7-foot sidewalks that allow safe pedestrian passage along the Laguna and access to its main footpath to the east.

Workers now are finishing up the painstaking handwork required to acid stain the concrete bridge exteriors so it can be stamped and textured to look like mortared river stone.

The large beam railings along the top of the bridge also have to be stained, according to Michael Sandoval, the project foreman with Ghilotti Construction Co.

“It looks cool, huh?” he said this week, gazing over the northern side of the bridge. “I like it.”