By: Chris Long

Just when we thought that we were in the clear as far as construction concerns around Heritage High School, it appears that a catastrophic mistake will cause detours to return to Forestville Road. According to our source, the North Carolina Department of Transportation is expected to make an announcement on Monday that will have huge effects on Heritage High School. The Forestville Road bridge, which was torn down and rebuilt in 2015, was found to not be constructed to its required standards and must be rebuilt to allow for the extension of the greenway underneath it. This will again require the 6.6 mile detour that was all too familiar for students living on the south side of Sanford Creek during the 2015-16 school year.

While the final dates of the road closure have not yet been finalized, the closure is expected to last 150 days and start sometime in mid-June.

The fault in the bridge was found just last month when the crew working on the greenway bumped their heads on the bottom of the bridge.

“It was an awful, awful sight,” construction manager Bob Euker testified, “multiple workers reported suffering from headaches and a few have even been found to have concussions.”

While it remains to be seen how such a catastrophic mistake could have been made during the rebuild 2 years ago, DOT officials were most surprised that the error wasn’t found earlier. The bridge was designed to have a greenway underneath, but it seems like someone forgot to actually put in the greenway. Now that it’s actually being constructed, the engineers of the project have realized that the headroom wasn’t large enough for people to go underneath and the entire bridge must be scraped and rebuilt.

Keep it here for the latest updates about the Forestville Road re-replacement, and just be thankful that at least someday we’ll be able to take the greenway from the high school all the way down to Rolesville.