By JIM MUSTIAN

Staff Reporter

MONTZ – St. Charles Parish is making inroads towards reopening and resurfacing Spillway Road and parish officials said this week that they intend to make the road drivable by the time school starts.

As several parish school buses rely on the road, the parish first plans to repair more than two dozen areas of the road, including “two major areas where the road is completely washed out,” Parish President V.J. St. Pierre said.

The parish has also applied for grants to have the entire road resurfaced at a later date.

“A complete resurfacing is what we are striving for, but patchwork will get the road open until that can be completed,” St. Pierre said.

Spillway Road was closed in late March due to high water and was badly damaged after the Bonnet Carré Spillway was opened in April for the first time in 11 years.

The St. Charles Parish School Board unanimously passed a resolution last month urging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to consider repairing the road. The resolution states that buses using Airline Highway as an alternate route place students “at a higher risk due to increased traffic levels.”

The repairs should take about a week to complete once they begin.

“We are doing everything we can to get this road back in service and ask citizens to be as patient as possible,” St. Pierre said.

But not all motorists in St. Charles are waiting for the parish’s approval to use the road. One afternoon, several vehicles in the span of just a few minutes went around the barricades to enter Spillway Road from the Montz side.

Cpt. Pat Yoes, public information officer for the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office, said police had not received many calls about people illegally using the road.

“It doesn’t appear we’re having a tremendous problem with it,” he said. “Most of the people going around the barricades are going to fish.”

Yoes noted that motorists caught going around the barricades could receive a traffic citation for failure to obey a traffic sign.