Highway 37 Shuts for 55 Hours Next Weekend, and the Detour Runs Through Napa
Caltrans will close Highway 37 between Mare Island and Sears Point from Friday night, Oct. 23, to Monday morning, Oct. 26, to lift the flood-prone eastbound lanes 3 feet before El Niño storms arrive. The signed detours send the traffic up Highway 29 and through Carneros.
NAPA: The highway Napa drivers take to Vallejo, the ferry and Interstate 80 is about to close for most of a weekend, and the way around it runs straight through Napa. Caltrans announced this week that Highway 37 will shut in both directions between Mare Island and Sears Point for 55 hours, from 10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 23, to 5 a.m. Monday, Oct. 26, so crews can begin emergency work to keep the low-lying road above El Niño storm water.
The full closure is the second act. Westbound Highway 37 closes first, on the nights of Wednesday, Oct. 21, and Thursday, Oct. 22, from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m., according to the Caltrans District 4 advisory. A second round of overnight closures follows on the weekend of Nov. 13 to 15, when crews remove the temporary barrier and shift traffic again.
Raising the road 3 feet
During the 55-hour closure, crews will demolish the center median and install K-rail barrier so both directions of traffic can share what are now the westbound lanes, Caltrans said. With traffic shifted, the work turns to the eastbound side, where portions of the roadway will be raised 3 feet, more than 1,000 feet of road in all, to improve resiliency and address the flooding that regularly swamps this stretch.
Whenever we lose 37, we see how important that route actually is.
The rush is about damage already done. Summer high tides eroded the shoreline and the embankment beneath the highway near Vallejo, and Caltrans spokesman Bart Ney told CBS News Bay Area the water never really left this year.
The water pretty much stayed out there in Vallejo the entire summer. … We have erosion that has taken some of the material that’s underneath the roadway.Bart Ney, Caltrans spokesman, to CBS News Bay Area
A 40-mile way around, through Napa
There is no short way around a closed Highway 37. Westbound drivers will exit onto northbound Highway 29 in Napa and follow Highway 12 west to Highway 121, which drops back down to the highway at Sears Point. Eastbound drivers reverse the loop, up Highway 121 and east along the Carneros Highway before rejoining Highway 37. Ney put the detour at about 40 miles and more than an hour.
Whenever we lose 37, we see how important that route actually is.Bart Ney, Caltrans spokesman, to CBS News Bay Area
About 40,000 vehicles a day use Highway 37, and a trip that takes 10 minutes with no traffic could take four times as long over the closure weekend. For Napa, that means a weekend of diverted Bay Area traffic on Highway 29 south of the city and through Carneros, on top of the usual late-October flow. Message signs are already posted around the region, and Caltrans advises motorists to use alternate routes whenever possible and to check 511.org or the Caltrans QuickMap before traveling.
Why the state is racing the rain
The emergency is the winter taking shape in the Pacific. In its Sept. 10 outlook, the NOAA Climate Prediction Center gave the current El Niño a greater than 90 percent chance of becoming a very strong event this fall and winter, and a 75 percent chance that its October-to-December peak exceeds the strength of any El Niño recorded since 1950. Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a statewide El Niño emergency on Sept. 21, and according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Highway 37 is the only Bay Area infrastructure on the governor’s list of 21 emergency projects.
The longer fix is still years and hundreds of millions of dollars away: a broader project to widen and raise the Sears Point to Mare Island segment, with a longer-term plan for the full 21 miles between Novato and Vallejo. Next weekend’s work is the triage version, 3 more feet of road between the bay and the roughly 40,000 drivers who depend on it every day.
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