Community Corner

Route 5 to Close For 24 Hours In Both Directions

Paving is scheduled for Thursday morning to Friday morning, bringing a yearlong, $3.8 million rock stabilization project to an end, state transportation officials say.

In a week when Fort Lee drivers have heard plenty about “alternate routes,” the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) added one more Tuesday, although this one is not likely to have nearly the impact as the Alexander Hamilton Bridge construction project could.

A three-tenths of a mile stretch of Route 5, one of the thoroughfares that connects Edgewater and Fort Lee, will fully close to traffic Thursday for about 24 hours, NJDOT officials announced.

The closure, which is scheduled to take place from 7 a.m. Thursday to 7 a.m. Friday, is for “final paving” after a yearlong, $3.8 million project to remove and stabilize loose rock along the western side of Route 5, officials said.

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The stretch of Route 5 being paved is between the Fort Lee Pump Station and Undercliff Avenue, but it will effectively shut down Route 5 entirely for drivers who use the road to get from one borough to the other after various periods of partial, one-way closures during the project, which dates back to summer 2011.

According to NJDOT officials, closing the road to traffic will enable the paving work to get done faster and bring the project to an end.

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During the 24-hour closure Thursday into Friday, Route 5 eastbound traffic going toward Edgewater will be detoured north on Palisade Avenue, and then to Main Street in Fort Lee to River Road, officials said.

An alternative route would be to take Palisade Avenue in the opposite direction through Cliffside Park, and then turn left on Gorge Road, which will take you to River Road across from City Place in Edgewater.

For those heading in the opposite direction, from Edgewater to Fort Lee, the NJDOT-recommended detour is River Road north to Bruce Reynolds Boulevard in Fort Lee, and then Martha Washington Way to Palisade Avenue heading south. But the Gorge Road route works in that direction as well.

The NJDOT detour routes were coordinated with both municipalities and NJ Transit, officials said.

Merco Inc., NJDOT’s contractor for the project, has completed what officials called “stabilization measures,” including rock scaling, installation of shotcrete mortar, wire netting and rock dowels and the removal of vegetation.

Those measures were intended to help stabilize the rock slope and reduce the “potential hazards of falling rock” along the road, officials said.

The series of closures on Route 5 were deemed necessary after more than a year of planning and consultation with both boroughs, according to NJDOT spokesman Tim Greeley, who called the closures “a safety measure, both for the actual contractor employees who are doing the rock-scaling, as well as the motoring public.”

"Rock scaling involves having those guys actually repelling up and down the rock face itself, removing loose rock and installing rock dowels and so on,” Greeley told Patch in 2011. “So due to the sort of geography of the area and the winding nature of Route 5, it became necessary for us to enact [the closures] to get that work done.”

Greeley said the last time there was a “rock fall incident” of any consequence on Route 5 was more than two years ago, when the state had to close the highway for a few hours because of rocks blocking the road. But he also said that there haven’t been any serious accidents in recent memory involving motorists or pedestrians.

“With the rock outcroppings as they currently exist, the potential is there that something could fall and potentially cause some type of accident,” Greeley said at the time. “Just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen, and we wanted to get out there and do everything we can.”

The exact timing of the overnight work scheduled to start Thursday morning is subject to change because of weather or “other factors,” officials said Tuesday, adding that if it does rain, the paving work will have to be rescheduled.

NJDOT encourages motorists to check its traffic information website, www.511nj.org, for updates, or to call 511.

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