Trucks traveling Interstate 95 north daily in the Charleston, N.C., area can expect delays because of repairs to the mile-long Lake Marion Bridge.
I-95 north drivers are advised to expect congestion, heavy at times, in the vicinity of the work near the Orangeburg-Clarendon County line especially during peak travel times on weekends. The work begins at mile marker 98, the Santee exit, where two lanes of northbound I-95 will be reduced to one lane until Nov. 16.
“It’s going to be a bottleneck or a funnel. It’s going to be problematic. Is it going to go without a hitch? Probably not,” Rick Todd, president & CEO of the South Carolina Trucking Assn. told the Sun News.
Todd said he has tried to put the word out to the association’s 700 member companies about the plan to close down one lane of the northbound two-lane bridge.
“There are going to be a lot of people surprised by it,” he said.
Drivers and truckers have no reasonable alternative for a detour around the work, he said. The DOT suggests drivers take I-26 west to Columbia, Interstate 77 north to Interstate 20 east, then to I-95 at Florence.
Trucks hauling loads wider than 8.5 ft. must take the detour. State-issued permits for those kinds of loads do not include destinations so officials have no way of knowing how many trucks will take the detour, said DOT spokesman Pete Poore.
