News

By Steve Plunkett

    Motorists on A1A will encounter a traffic snag two weeks before the Ocean Avenue bridge closes March 18.
Resident G. John Krediet is building a private pedestrian tunnel under State Road A1A that will close the highway to all but local traffic for up to five days beginning March 5. A temporary shell-rock lane will be built west of the road at 1780 S. Ocean Blvd. for emergency vehicles and neighbors.
    “There will be police stationed at both sides of the road when the road is closed. It’s one of the requirements,’’ Town Manager Linda Stumpf said.
    The tunnel will be near the southern end of the parcel and handicap-accessible, with access ramps nearer the center on both sides of the road. Cranes will maneuver 25-ton tunnel pieces into position.
    “We’ll do as quick a construction project as possible,” Krediet’s tunnel contractor, Ed O’Leary, told town commissioners at their Jan. 24 meeting.
    O’Leary said his company has built two similar tunnels, one that took four days and one that took four-and-a-half. Crews work round the clock, he said.
    “There’s a chance it can be done in three, but in all realistic and being optimistic, four days is about your average,” he said.
    A1A will be opened one lane at a time for the following two or three days while the road is resurfaced.
    Commissioners’ fears that the tunnel would be too close to the neighbors were eased by hearing that no neighbors had complained about the proposal.
    “We want our constituents to have what they want. We just want to protect them from one another,” Vice Mayor Robert Evans said.
    Stumpf said the state Department of Transportation would not allow the tunnel work to occur after the replacement of the Ocean Avenue bridge begins.
That project is planned to take two years and will detour motorists headed for the mainland to go north to the Lake Worth bridge or south to the Ocean Avenue bridge in Ocean Ridge.
    Krediet, the chairman of CF Capital Corp. and former CEO of Sparkling Spring Water Holdings Ltd. of Nova Scotia, bought the 1.9 acres in 2010 for $4 million, according to county property records. He plans to build a beach cabana after the tunnel is completed.