Ortega Highway safety project moving forward

By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer | Tuesday, August 21, 2007 9:32 PM PDT ∞

It's far from over, but the construction on the Ortega Highway that is triggering delays during the day and closures at night is beginning to produce results.

A half-year after the start of the $40 million project, the work has delivered improvements along a three-quarter-mile section at the Riverside-Orange county line.

"So far, we're on schedule," said Yvonne Washington, a California Department of Transportation spokeswoman in Irvine.

However, the highway-building agency still has 2 1/2 miles to go on the project in the heart of the Cleveland National Forest's northern district. Caltrans expects to complete the project, which stretches between the county line and Caspers Wilderness Park, by winter 2010.

While the work is on schedule, it is not on budget.

The $40 million price tag represents a nearly 50 percent increase from the $27 million figure Caltrans quoted when it proposed the project a few years ago. Pam Gorniak, another spokeswoman for Caltrans' Orange County district, said the change is a result of increases in prices for asphalt, concrete and steel.

"Construction materials costs have soared," Gorniak said.

Ortega is the 30-mile piece of Highway 74 between Lake Elsinore and San Juan Capistrano. The construction is focused on a 3.3-mile, accident-prone section with tight hairpin curves, narrow lanes and a lack of shoulders, according to Caltrans.

The work is taking place around the clock, with travel through the construction zone limited to one lane during the day and shut completely between 8:30 p.m. and 4:30 a.m.

Caltrans is aiming to make the drive between Lake Elsinore and San Juan Capistrano safer. The agency said it is doing that by widening the road's narrow 10-foot lanes to the standard 12-foot width, adding 4-foot shoulders and placing raised strips along the median that rattle and warn motorists when they are about to cross into oncoming traffic.

Caltrans also is adding a pair of turnouts and shaving cliff walls to enable drivers to see around blind corners and to prevent rainstorms from dumping boulders onto the highway, Gorniak said.

She said workers are using modern machinery never before used in Southern California -- essentially a giant saw -- to peel back rugged rock walls.

"They pretty much are sawing it off," she said. "It looks like a big wheel."

Gorniak said drivers should see better around two dozen curves.

What workers aren't doing is adding lanes, she said, as the project mission is not to add capacity.

Built in the 1930s, the road was first named the Elsinore-San Juan Capistrano Highway to the Sea. It was designed to carry beach lovers to the ocean and water skiers to Lake Elsinore. In recent years, it has become a popular alternate route to Orange County employment centers for Riverside County commuters weary of fighting traffic on Highway 91.

The road carries about 12,000 cars a day.

Before the project got under way, Wildomar resident Bob Cashman, who drives 57 miles to his aerospace engineering job in Irvine, was driving the Ortega Highway every day. When the orange cones came out, Cashman headed north to Corona.

He said he prefers the certainty of the Highway 91 drive to the risk of getting caught in a construction delay on the Ortega -- or worse, a miles-long traffic jam triggered by an accident on the mountain road.

He takes the Ortega home on Friday afternoons, however, because of the mass exodus from Orange County at those times. As he comes through, he said, it is hard to tell whether Caltrans is making progress on the safety project.

"It looks like it's going to last forever," he said.

Other regular Ortega commuters, such as Lake Elsinore's Louisa Dixon, still use the route every day.

"I wasn't one of the sky-is-falling people who said, 'Oh my gosh, they're going to be closing down the Ortega Highway,'" said Dixon, who commutes 52 miles to Irvine. "I see absolutely no reason why I should avoid it. To me, it hasn't been an issue at all."

Dixon said construction workers, for the most part, have been generous to commuters. She said she almost never gets stopped on the way in to work.

Occasionally, she gets held up going home. But Dixon said the wait is usually about five minutes, and she passes the time by reading a book.

"Phones don't work up there, so you've got to take reading material with you," she said.

Dixon said most commuters seem to have adapted. Once in a while, someone turns around to avoid waiting.

"The rest of us just lay back and we chill," she said.

-- Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2623, or ddowney@californian.com.