Pavement on one of Vicksburg’s busiest highway stretches needs resurfacing and the project will be considered for accelerated work, the state’s transportation engineer said.

The stretch of U.S. 61 South was already ranked among the worst-rutted roads in the 12-county Mississippi Department of Transportation District that includes Vicksburg, but it will be considered for a move up, Walter Lyons, district engineer for the Mississippi Department of Transportation, said.

“It looks like this one’s time has come,” Lyons said after inspecting the ruts in the highway’s northbound lanes near LeTourneau Road, just south of the Vicksburg city limits.

The ruts are deep and rainwater standing in them can increase the risk that drivers will lose control of their vehicles, Lyons said.

A Fayette man, Henry Brown, said that’s what happened to him while he was driving a 2004 Dodge Stratus. It hydroplaned and flipped near LeTourneau Road about three weeks ago.

Brown wasn’t hurt but said his insurance premiums have increased. He noted that drivers approaching a spot in the southbound lanes are at least warned by a sign of water on the road in a rainstorm.

The MDOT installed drains on a hillside west of U.S. 61 South earlier this year to catch runoff from a new subdivision that has been increased there, Lyons said.

The stretch of U.S. 61 South near LeTourneau is traveled by about 12,000 to 18,000 vehicles a day, 2000 traffic-count figures from MDOT show. Those numbers rank it 6,000 to 12,000 vehicles a day behind the city’s busiest non-interstate highway stretch, U.S. 61 North from Interstate 20 to around Bowie Road.

“There are a lot of log trucks on this road,” Lyons said of the stretch of U.S. 61 South around Vicksburg’s southern boundary.

MDOT staff surveys all roads every two years and completes a ranking of those that need to be resurfaced, Lyons said.

“Our standard is anything over half an inch,” he said of the rut-depth measurement needed to make the list.

The list is used to decide which resurfacing projects are funded first from the district’s resurfacing budget of about $8 million to $8.5 million annually, Lyons said. At a cost of about $150,000 a mile, that budget doesn’t go very far, he added.

Any resurfacing along U.S. 61 South would result in the extension of the pavement’s width to ensure that a 2-foot paved shoulder that has become mandatory exists.

If two roads are rutted to about the same depth, MDOT staff may consider other factors such as traffic volumes in deciding which projects to fund first, Lyons said.

“We’ll take a hard look at it and try,” Lyons said.

Southbound lanes of U.S. 61 South in the Signal Hill area are undergoing reconstruction in an effort to fix a long-term stability problem engineers have said is caused by underground water flows.

MDOT also has under way a project to rebuild Interstate 20 from the river bridge to near Bovina. That work includes removing fencing and brush, reworking frontage roads on Vicksburg’s perimeter and a triple layer of resurfacing on the highway’s four lanes.