Overview:

The road between 11th and 18th Avenues will be open only to local traffic. Drivers will have to detour to Oak Patch Road.

Seismic retrofit construction on the Bailey Hill Bridge over the Amazon Creek will start Monday in West Eugene. The construction will continue up until the end of August. 

“If we’re going to experience an earthquake, this bridge would fail. And we need it to stay standing, so we’re moving forward,”  said Willow Hamilton, community engagement coordinator for the City of Eugene.

Bailey Hill Road will be closed to traffic on the half-mile stretch of road that runs from 11th Avenue to 18th Avenue. Hamilton said the entire road will be closed, because there are no alternate routes.

“Say someone is on 18th and they want to get to 11th and they turned right onto Bailey Hill Road, they would hit the construction,” Hamilton said. “We have to close that many blocks because there’s no way to get people out of that once they get in.”

Motorists will be detoured via Oak Patch Road.

Local access will remain for Bailey Hill Road residents, and pedestrians and cyclists will also continue to have access.

The project is getting $600,000 of federal funding.

Jasmine Saboorian is a recent graduate from the University of Oregon and is an intern with the Charles Snowden Program for Excellence in Journalism. A native of Los Angeles, Jasmine was a journalism major and sports business minor at UO. She began her journalism career in high school as the news editor for her school’s newspaper, the Calabasas Courier, where she discovered her passion for journalism.