County Road 285 to be closed for bridge replacement

SMITH COUNTY — A portion of Smith County Road 285, also known as Old Omen Road, will be closed for less than two months this summer so a bridge can be replaced. Starting on Monday, June 13, the bridge near the Prairie Creek Park Area, will be closed. The 22-foot wide concrete bridge will be demolished and replaced with a longer, 30-foot wide all-concrete bridge. “We’ll have a wider roadway and a bridge when we finish this project,” County Engineer Frank Davis said. During construction, the portion of CR 285, near its intersection with CR 2215 (Lake Meadows Road), to Farm-to-Market Road 848, will be closed to thru traffic. This bridge services the east side of Lake Tyler and a portion of Lake Tyler East. The detour around Lake Tyler will be about 16 miles, he said. “We know this will be a hardship for many people traveling the Lake Tyler area but we thought this was the best time to reconstruct this much-needed bridge,” Davis said.

The project is being done while schools are out for the summer. The area serves Chapel Hill, Arp and Whitehouse school districts. Message boards around the area have been placed to alert drivers about the detour. The construction project is part of the Smith County Road and Bridge Bond Program, and is expected to be completed before the start of school. Stateline Construction LLC, is the contractor on the bridge project. Once the bridge construction project is complete, roadwork to CR 285 will begin but the road will be open during that construction, Davis said.

That project will include about 5.7 miles of CR 285, as well as CR 2274 and 2275, for a total of 8.5 miles. This will be the longest stretch of road upgraded as part of the Road and Bridge Bond Program at this time, he said. Roadwork will include grinding the existing roadway, cement treating it, widening it to 27 feet and asphalt overlay. That project will be bid out to contractors this summer.

For more information about Smith County road closures, click here.