MANKATO — With five bridges and a pair of major road projects, it’s another busy highway season in Blue Earth County.

Tops on any non-alphabetical list would be the Victory Drive extension.

There’s no suitable east-west detour to take Madison Avenue’s eastbound traffic during construction, so Southern Minnesota Construction just built one.

It’s just one part of the effort to keep four lanes open during construction.

“It’s taken an extreme amount of traffic control,” said Jim Freeberg, vice president of Mankato-based SMC, which submitted the lowest of two bids on the project.

That detour has put the project three weeks to a month behind schedule, he said, because it took longer than expected to move the power poles in its way.

County Engineer Al Forsberg said Victory Drive is going “basically according to plan,” despite the complicated network of power distribution lines (which serve local neighborhoods) and transmission lines (taller structures that serve a larger area).

Both types of power lines have to be reburied.

The project is expected to be completed by the end of October.

Swamp soil

To the east, a three-year, $3 million reconstruction of County Road 26 between County Road 12 and Madison Lake began last month.

This construction season will focus on stabilizing soft, wet soils that are unsuitable for road building.

That involves laying an engineered heavy fabric over the top of the soil, followed by sand and a layer of dirt.

Forsberg has an analogy for how this works: The wet soil is like a sponge and the soil applies pressure, compacting the soil and draining it of water.

Eventually, the soil is dry enough to support the road.

By 2011, County Road 26 should be all-new, with wider shoulders, improved sight distances and fresh pavement.

The work was to include a smoothing of curves around Eagle Lake, (the lake, not the city) but it would have required moving the road into a wetland. The county eventually decided the cost of satisfying environmental regulators was too high and abandoned that part of the project.

Bridge quintet

Five bridge projects (four bridges, technically) are also in the works this year.

Three of them are smaller and were funded by money allocated under the transportation bill. They mostly serve rural traffic and are especially important to farmers bringing crops to market.

Together the three bridges will cost about $1.44 million.

Another, a crossing of County Road 50 over railroad tracks and Minneopa Creek, finished just a few weeks ago.

Likewise, a new bridge over the Minnesota River at Judson has been completed.

But, in much the same circumstances of the County Road 26 projects, the wet soil around the area needs more time to dry before the road on the Blue Earth County side can be covered with asphalt. That’s scheduled to happen next summer.

Finally, the county is overlaying 20 miles of its 400 or so miles of highway, life-extending maintenance that each mile of road should get every 20 years or so, Forsberg said.