Impact of Meridian, 28th Street project
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – The major project underneath Meridian and 28th streets will impact a lot of drivers, but people close to the project say its impact will benefit the entire city.
The project is all to help the change the face of a major asset to the community, the waterways.Meridian Street will be closed at 28th Street until approximately Oct. 31, according to Citizen’s Energy it’s because of work being done on the DigIndy Tunnel project that is being built to clean up the city’s waterways.
28th Street will be closed east of Illinois Street to Pennsylvania Street as well. For the more than 50,000 people living in the area known as Midtown Indy, every time it rains about a quarter inch there is raw sewage overflow. That’s raw sewage flowing into waterways near the homes that creates a health and ecological impact.
It’s part of a federal EPA mandate that the city has to stop the discharge over a period of years of combining sewage into the waterways.
Michael McKillip, the executive director of Midtown Indy, says the city’s infrastructure is just old.
“You have 100-year-old infrastructure in a city whose population has quadrupled over 100 years. The system wasn’t build for this amount of sewage,” said McKillip. “Combining storm water and sewage water together every time there’s a quarter of an inch of rain, some areas of the city see sewage overflow. So separating that system giving the system time to process the raw sewage and to separate it from the waterways is essentially what this project is all about.”
One major hub that will be affected by this is the Ivy Tech Community college campus. Leaders say they are telling students to use Illinois Street and Capitol Avenue for access to and from campus, and then to use 26th and 27th Streets to access the majority of the buildings and parking lots.