NITRO, W.Va. — The largest Roads to Prosperity project that saw six miles of interstate widening and the construction of two bridges over the Kanawha River is complete.
The project on Interstate 64 between Nitro and Scott Depot and was part of Gov. Jim Justice’s $2.8 billion Road to Prosperity program.
Justice, along with state Transportation Secretary Jimmy Wriston and state and local officials, came together Tuesday afternoon for a dedication ribbon cutting.
Wriston said the bridges and road widening will hopefully benefit residents in many different ways.
“It’s a wave of relief from my standpoint,” Wriston said. “But the real excitement is what it’s going to do to change the lives of the people over here, to reduce accidents, make this so much safer, and make that commute so much more sufficient, this is what the roads to prosperity was all about.”
He also said that despite the problems they faced, they were able to come together in order to get the project done.
“It certainly is, it’s communication, we built those communication systems on day one, and we stuck to them, we executed,” Wriston said. “We had problems, don’t me wrong, there’s always problems on a project but we worked together, and we solved them.”
Nitro Police Chief Chris Fleming said communication is what made the project run smoothly.
“We had a really good working relationship with everybody involved, they kept us in the loop on a lot of things, it worked out real well,” Fleming said.
He also said that he hopes that with the project complete, it will help with reducing the number of crashes that the police department has seen in the past five years.
“Yeah, we actually looked at it this morning, over the last five years between the I-64 bridge on the St. Albans side to the 46-mile marker there were about 618 crashes in that five-year span, so hopefully this should make a huge difference in it with the widening of the lanes,” Fleming said.
The bridges that the project saw being built were the Nitro World War I Memorial Bridge, which was completed in 2022 and the Donald M. Legg Memorial Bridge, which was completed this fall.
The completion of the two bridges will open up a major bottleneck on one of the heavily-traveled sections of interstate in West Virginia.