Construction on Trunk Highway 61 is scheduled to begin in the fall of 2027.
With the Hastings Fire Department and Hastings Police Department located on or near Vermillion Street, a KDWA listener asked how emergency responders will navigate the construction and whether the project could affect response times.
Hastings Deputy Fire Chief Bryan Schowalter addresses those concerns.
“Yeah, having you know the police department just a block off of Vermillion Street and the fire department right on the corner, our major route to and from all of our calls is typically Vermillion Street. So, for the listeners that remember when the bridge was redone, Highway 61 or Vermillion Street was significantly affected by the reduced traffic lanes, and the same will happen. So we work very closely with MnDOT on traffic routes and easements that that are allowed or what we can utilize. We do have alternate routes, so if we’re going to be doing a lot of east-west travel in an emergency response, we’ll be using streets like 2nd and 4th and 10th and 55 or 15th Street and County Road 46, and we’ll try and minimize the amount of time that we’re on Vermillion Street, just because that will get congested. And then, if we have north-south directional traffic that we need to respond to quickly, you know, we do have other north-south streets like General Sieben, Pleasant, Pine River, and then on the east side of town we have Tyler, so or Tyler and Ramsey. I’m sorry. So there, there are alternate routes for us, and we do stay on top of lane closures when traffic is diverted. So we do have to be mindful of when heavy traffic periods are, and we’ll do our best to stay away from those as well. Because the last thing we want is to have a either an ambulance fire engine or a squad car stuck in gridlock.”
Schowalter also offers insight into discussions involving MnDOT, the City of Hastings and local residents.
“Yeah. So during the whole planning phase, you know, obviously MnDOT has gotten citizens involved with what their concerns are and what they would like to see happen, but then they’ve worked very closely with Public Works with the City of Hastings to try and work on traffic direction patterns, and then also how the final road design is going to look, and then they’ve worked with us as well regarding temporary traffic chains, alternate routes, and keeping everything as streamlined as possible. So we do know that this is not going to be smooth. We do know this is not going to be an easy process. But Highway 61 or Vermillion Street desperately needs to be redesigned, and then also getting some different traffic patterns involved need to take place. So it’ll be a difficult period while this is taking place, and you know the designs keep changing, and once they iron something out, I’m sure we’ll come up with the final plan on how we’re going to navigate through all the congestion.”
You can find a link to the MnDOT Highway 61 project in this report at KDWA.com.
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