There’s a lot that Henry Adams doesn’t like about the traffic on the extension of Lyndale Avenue that feeds into the Crosstown/35W in south Minneapolis. Big trucks sometimes shake the house and sound like they’re coming through his bedroom. Then there are the stranded motorists and other strangers who wander into his backyard, thanks to a gap between the new noisewall put up by MnDOT. Crosstown construction crews took out the old chain-link fence that used to keep those people out, but left a chunk of it that had been encased over the years in the trunk of a tree. The tree is gone, but the stump has remained with its embedded and jagged fragment of fence railing, for more than a year.

After I wrote about how another south Minneapolis resident, Mary VanSlooten, found her home in an island surrounded by Crosstown/35 construction, Whistleblower heard from a number of homeowners with their own tales of suffering in road construction zones. One of them was Adams, 72, a retired Metro Transit bus driver who has lived with his wife Jeannie at 1030 W. 61st Street since 1968. They realize the state is unlikely to do anything about the trucks. But they don’t see any reason why they have to sit on their deck and look at a metal-impaled stump or put up with people banging on their sliding glass door asking to use the phone.

“A tree with the fence rail growing through it should have been removed,” Henry and Jeannie Adams wrote to MnDOT in October 2007. “It can be very hazardous to our great-grandchildren, and others!”

Sixteen months later, the stump is still there. “It’s ugly,” said Jeannie Adams, 72, a retired public health nurse. Then there’s the gap, where the noise wall stops just short of the back of Bachman’s garden supply store. There’s a flimsy-looking plastic orange fence that’s easily bypassed. “I just don’t feel safe… any more,” she said.

On Thursday, I spoke to John Griffith, west area manager for the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Griffith knows of the Adams’ dissatisfaction with the effects of the Crosstown construction, but he said he hadn’t heard of the problems with the menacing stump or the gap in the fence. He said he would do something about both.

Griffith said MnDOT would certainly want to eliminate any safety hazard, which the stump surely is. When told about the trouble with people wandering through the gap, Griffith said, “I’ll see what we can do to get some kind of fence up.”

Whistleblower will check back in to say whether MnDOT does something this time.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Neighborhood nuisances. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.