A Door County highway that washed away last month is reopened, but work is not done

CLAY BANKS - A county highway closed for a month after torrential rains washed away part of the road is now reopened to traffic, although work is continuing in that location and caution is urged when driving through it.

County U was closed south of Sturgeon Bay on June 25 after a large drainage culvert under the highway at Rosewood Road and South Shiloh Road, a little less than a mile south of La Salle Park on the Lake Michigan shore in the Town of Clay Banks, overfilled, which washed out the culvert and the roadway. As a result, the Door County Highway Department set up a detour that used County J on the north side of the closure, County S and Kennedy Drive in Kewaunee County on the south end.

Since then, crews from the highway department have excavated the area, installed more than 200 feet of culvert pipe and filled in the surrounding area to support the new roadway.

While the highway is again open as of July 25, the section that was rebuilt currently is gravel, not paved. A press release from the highway department said the gravel will need to settle for about a month before paving can begin.

Because of that, the department recommends drivers reduce their speed and use caution when driving through the gravel section of the road.

The overfilling of the culvert happened after Sturgeon Bay and Southern Door County was belted with three bouts of heavy rain in less than five days, with the heaviest rainfall occurring the day of the washout. Various reports said the area received more than an inch and a half of rain June 20, about an inch June 23 and anywhere from 3 to 7 inches, depending on the exact location, in about a four-hour period June 25. The resulting total was 5.5 to almost 10 inches of rain over those five days.

Contact Christopher Clough at 920-562-8900 or [email protected].

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This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Door County highway that washed away reopens, but the work is not done