The long-winded rehabilitation of Green River Road #1 has finally been completed.
Henderson County Engineer Nick Stallings shared photos of the rehabbed area of the road at Tuesday’s Henderson County Fiscal Court meeting.
The work included moving the road 65 feet away from the Green River onto land the county obtained from the Kentucky Division of Forestry.
The county also rebuilt the collapsed area where a slide occurred in February 2024. Stallings said since the collapsed area’s rebuild, it has withstood the rising and falling waters of the two major flooding events this year.
A portion of the roadway, which had been located feet from the water, initially slid into the river in early February of 2024. Days after the initial slide, the collapsed area grew larger, leaving the road impassable.
County officials closed the road, but many people still disregarded the signage and drove through, according to past comments in Fiscal Court meetings.
Stallings said that the slide occurred at a bend in the river where water pressure is strong, and over the years, there have been numerous slides in that area of the road.
Fiscal Court mulled the best solution to fix the road for months—including a plan to permanently close a section of the road that included the area of the slide—before deciding that the best solution was to reconstruct the road away from the river.
Stallings said battling red tape to get the land swapped from the state forestry division took more than a year. Once that was finalized, the actual construction took about three weeks of work, he said.
Stallings added that if a person had never driven through the area, it would be hard to tell that the road had been moved over.
Stallings said 850 of road were replaced. The project cost $143,901.60, according to Kurt Wiesen, Henderson County deputy judge-executive.