SH2 REMUTAKA HILL – MAY/JUNE RESILIENCE PROJECT COMPLETED

SH2 REMUTAKA HILL – MAY/JUNE RESILIENCE PROJECT COMPLETED

Thank you to road users for your patience in May and June during the State Highway 2 Remutaka Hill project to improve the long-term strength of the highway and keep people safe. 

The resilience project was completed with 10 nights of road closures, followed by 20 days with stop/go traffic control. This work was part of a long-term programme to upgrade drainage and prevent slips undermining the road along this steep mountain range highway which experiences extreme rainfall. Maintenance works were also undertaken during the night closures.

We don’t usually do 2 weeks in a row of night closures and it is now rare for us to undertake daytime stop/go works on the hill. Stop/go works have decreased by 95% since we began working night-time closures in 2019. Prior to that road users experienced stop/go works on about 300 days in a year. We can now  complete most of a year’s maintenance in a comparatively small number of night-time road closures and have had 23 night-time closures in the current Remutaka Hill roadworks season from September 2020 to 25 June 2021.

The night-time closures provide safety for our workers and give them room to provide a higher quality of maintenance. When we worked solely under stop/go on the hill’s steep, narrow road, there was often just a small gap between our workers and vehicles driving by. On occasion, vehicles drove into the worksites, only just missing our workers and, one time, knocking a worker over. That doesn’t happen now.

Some statistics from the May/June Remutaka Hill resilience project and maintenance:

• 2 retaining walls on banks below the road: the larger one having 11 anchors, each 11m long, pinning the wall to the bank (the smaller retaining wall did not require anchors)
• 2 new and 2 expanded drainage culverts: 50m of pipe crosses the road (divided between 4 locations)
• Road repairs: 287 tonnes of asphalt for 25 patches at multiple sites - a total area of 935.97m², more than the floor space of 5 average new build houses (180 m², 2019 NZ Statistics). 1.2km of asphalt road surfacing was laid to date this year.
• Motorcycle safety rails: 149m installed on corners below existing barriers to prevent motorcyclists snagging on barrier posts in the event they are involved in an accident
• Line-marking: 1.7km of yellow and white line-markings completed, bringing the year’s total to 7.65km of yellow and white lines.

We would appreciate your feedback on the project and on your experience of driving the road over the Remutaka Hill.