Rimer Pond Road Closes April 14

The DOT will close a portion of Rimer Pond Road Monday as work begins on ‘Dead Man’s Curve.’

BLYTHEWOOD – The S.C. Department of Transportation (SCDOT) will close Rimer Pond Road to thru traffic from April 14 until Aug. 31 while construction crews straighten and widen the road’s infamous curve, according to Allen Thompson, Resident Construction Engineer with SCDOT’s Richland Construction Department.

The curve will be re-aligned starting between the entrance to Eagles Glen and Perfecting Faith Church and continue to a point near Round Top Elementary School. Traffic south of Eagles Glen subdivision will enter and exit Rimer Pond Road where it intersects with Highway 21 (Wilson Blvd.). Traffic north of the construction will be detoured via Round Top Church Road to Langford Road.

Bryan Jones, District Engineering Administrator, released a statement on March 31 explaining that while schools in the area (Round Top Elementary and Blythewood Middle) would be impacted by the detours, the school administrations would be informed so they could reroute school bus traffic during the four-month construction period.

When a statistical comparison was made a few years ago with other one-half mile sections of roads around the state with high crash incidents, the locally notorious curve on Rimer Pond Road easily met the qualifications for improvement – 29 crashes in four years with 12 of those being injury crashes, according to Joey Riddle, Safety Program Engineer for SCDOT.

“To make the road safer,” Riddle told The Voice in early 2013, “we’ll be widening the two existing 10-foot lanes at the curve to 12-foot lanes with 2-foot paved shoulders beyond the white line on the edges of the road. This will make the road about 28 feet wide, from edge to edge.”

Riddle said rumble strips would also be added to the road’s edges to warn drivers when they are departing from the road. He said that while rumble strips are expensive to install, a study of the road’s accidents showed that 23 of the 29 crashes were land departures.

Thompson said that in order to eliminate some of the curve, the road will have to be moved as much as 8 feet in some places.

A guard rail will be installed on both sides of the road at the low point of the curve where there are a couple of creeks alongside the road across from the Rimer Pond dam.

Thompson said the road corrections should make the curve safer.

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