A truck on Mark West Springs Road heads for the Sutter hospital construction site
next to the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts north of Santa Rosa.
Photo courtesy of Peter Fremgen
Here’s a possible traffic delay that you may want to avoid for the next four weeks.
From 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, 25 to 30 big-rig trucks an hour — that’s about one every two minutes — will be hauling dirt down River Road to the construction site of the new Sutter Health hospital next to the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts north of Santa Rosa.
The trucks are bringing a total of 60,000 cubic yards of dirt from a quarry in Forestville, and it’ll take 25 days to complete, said Sutter spokeswoman Lisa Amador. The hauling was in its fifth day Friday.
Flaggers are stationed on Mark West Springs Road to halt traffic to allow the trucks to leave the construction site, and for the most part traffic flows pretty well. But traffic does stack up at times, particularly during the morning and evening commutes, so heads up.
The dirt is being piled 10 feet high to compress the construction site’s soil in preparation for the $284 million hospital’s foundation and, ultimately, its walls that will rise in fall 2011. Amador said the dirt will sit for four to six months before being moved to another spot at the construction site to compress more soil for another four to six months for building. Then the dirt will be spread elsewhere around the construction site.
The hospital is scheduled to open in fall 2014.
