Detour signs should be popping up Monday in Pembroke as work on the Anderson Lane drainage project crosses highways 119 and 67.

The signs are already there, they’re just facing away from the roads, according to the City Projects Manager Ricky McCoy.

“Those signs you see facing everybody’s houses,” he told members of the Pembroke City Council on Monday. “They’re detour signs for when we detour 119. And vice versus, when we cut 119 and get it complete, we’ll be coming across 67.”

Both are main arteries in Pembroke, where work on the Anderson Lane drainage project has been ongoing for months as the city tries to alleviate flooding by replacing undersized pipes under the street.

The $248,000 project is being funded by special local option sales taxes and the Georgia Department of Transportation and is scheduled to be finished in April.

But McCoy said the contractor, Vidalia-based OCS Inc., has run into both bad weather and a number of unexpected utilities.

“It’s not that they aren’t working,” he said. “I was over there today and they had run into a gas line, two water lines, telephone and cable that wasn’t supposed to be there,” he said. “The projection date is kind of hard to project because they don’t know what they’re going to run into.

“We located most of what we knew was there, but there was a good many (utilities) we didn’t know and the contractor has to deal with it.”

Traffic

The council also heard an update on the new Bryan County Elementary School, which will be located on Paine Street behind Bryan

County High School and Bryan County Middle School — which led mayor-pro-tem Johnnie Miller to note there’s going to be a headache.

“We’ve got to think about it, because right now there’s a traffic problem between 7:30 and 8 in the morning. Buses can’t even turn out of there,” said Miller, a retired teacher who now drives a bus for BCHS.

“I deal with on a daily basis. We’ve got the high school and middle school there now, and we’re about to add another school.”
Mayor Mary Warnell said it is a problem, but only for a short while.

“If you leave at 10 until 8 you get caught in it,” she said. “But at 10 after 8 you don’t, because everybody’s in school.”
McCoy said the city will look at ways to alleviate the problem.