The state Department of Transportation's ongoing rehabilitation work on bridges along Interstate 77 has turned to the southbound lanes, with detours and delays set to continue throughout this week.

The interstate’s southbound lanes are closed between Bluff Road and the Interstate 26 interchange in the counties of Richland and Lexington. Work started the evening of April 14 and is set to conclude Sunday, April 23.

The first phase of the rehab project took place between March 24 and April 1, with work finishing a day earlier than anticipated.

Nine bridges were rehabilitated during the northbound phase, with an additional eight set to get the same treatment during the southbound phase.

The northbound closure caused increased traffic on major thoroughfares in the Cayce and West Columbia area. 

DOT recommends using S.C. Highway 277 southbound, Interstate 20 westbound and Interstate 26 eastbound to get around Columbia during the southbound closure and anticipates commuter traffic being pushed onto some local roads. More information on detour routes can be found at scdot.org/i77-sb-detour.aspx.

Tony Magwood, DOT’s resident maintenance engineer for Richland County, spoke to the importance of the project when it was announced in December.

“Over the past five years, we have done significant maintenance along those bridges, both in Richland and Lexington counties, and we continue to perform maintenance,” he said. “However, we've seen that just those small fixes are not going to get the job done. That's why a larger fix was put into place.”

He emphasized that DOT is hoping to accomplish the work as quickly and with as little disruption as possible by working day and night on all bridges simultaneously during each phase and not closing the interstates in both directions at once.

“The decks ... are going to be removed and resurfaced in a matter of a few hundred hours as opposed to conventional methods of taking several hundred days,” he said.