CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — After the city spent around $14 million dollars to resurface all seven miles of Ocean Drive, the city is taking action not only to protect the street but will soon begin a monitoring program to predict it's lifespan.
It's over seven miles in each direction and considered the smoothest drive in Corpus Christi. It's also the city's signature street.
"Ocean Drive's been a street that we watch, I watch frequently, and what we notice is that there are numerous cuts into the brand new street and especially on an asphalt street," City Manager Peter Zanoni said. "Once you cut that nice cohesive surface, it introduces water, it quickly undermines the underneath and soon your streets back to terrible conditions."
Those cuts are from new and renovated homes along the street where new connections are made to the city's water mains.
To fix those cuts, the city has enacted a new ordinance to make sure those holes are properly repaired.
"They have to repave the street from curb to curb and about 25 feet from the cut zone so that's going to have a nice big stretch of reconstructed asphalt," Zanoni said.
Along with the new ordinance comes a new project specifically designed to find out who passes through this section of street and how many people pass just to make sure that our street lasts a long time.
Public Works director Ernie De la Garza said the program is called the Weigh-In-Motion data collection program.
"It gives us the speed, traffic counts and also gives us the classification of vehicle," De la Garza said. "We take that information along with some other test data that we have obtained on Ocean Drive to calculate remaining life in the structure."
Pressure pads will stretch from Water's Edge Park to Swantner Park and will be measured over a ten-year period.
"The sensor devices that are being installed is to proactively collect data so that we can proactively maintain the street rather than waiting for it to fail," Zanoni says,
Drivers need to watch for lane closures as the sensors are being installed through Wednesday.
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