It’s known as South Carolina’s Coffin Corridor. Here’s how $9 million is being used to save lives on I-95.

Drivers along Interstate 95 in Jasper County will begin noticing some changes along the roadway: temporary lane closures, fewer trees in the medians, and, hopefully, fewer fatal accidents along the deadly stretch of highway known as the “coffin corridor.”

The S.C. Department of the Transportation has started a $9-million safety improvement project along Jasper County’s entire 33-mile stretch of I-95.

Toby Wickenhoefer, a construction engineer with SCDOT, said Monday that the department intends to make the roadway safer by removing trees from areas close to the roadway and expanding “clear zones” where drivers may accidentally swerve into the shoulder area.

While the first goal is to keep drivers on the roadway, “but when they do get off the road, we want to give them space to recover” before striking any trees, Wickenhoefer said.

The state plans to clear all trees in any median less than 160 feet wide.

If part of the median is wider than 160 feet, only the trees within the 55-foot clear zone on either side will be cut, according to documents submitted by SCDOT to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The project also includes installation of rumble strips to give drivers a heads-up before they exit the roadway, as well as cable barriers within the medians to keep out-of-control cars from entering on-coming traffic.

In an August statement regarding the project, S.C. Secretary of Transportation Christy Hall said, “A great number of our highway deaths occur on rural roads of all types, including sections of our interstates just like” I-95 in Jasper County.

Wickenhoefer, too, acknowledged the highway’s dangerous reputation.

The Jasper County stretch “was often — and up until now — referred to as ‘coffin corridor,’” he said. “There have been a lot of fatalities and a lot of accidents.”

“Most (of those fatalities) were related to hitting trees in the median,” he said. “So, hopefully increasing the clear zone will” decrease the number of major accidents.

In 2015, The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette found that more motorists were dying in tree-related wrecks along this main artery to Hilton Head Island than anywhere else along I-95 in South Carolina.

Roughly 36 percent of all the I-95 tree-related fatalities — 25 deaths from 2010 through 2015 — occurred in the stretch of interstate that runs through Jasper County, according to the newspapers’ analysis.

The state had slated construction of the safety improvements — which will be paid for using federal grant funds — to begin in 2016, but delays pushed the project back.

Starting Monday evening, between about 7 p.m. and midnight, there will be temporary single-lane closures along the inside lanes of both the north and southbound portions of the roadway in the Ridgeland area.

Wickenhoefer said the closures will allow crews to begin hauling away the large trees cut down from the medians.

“Right now it looks like kind of a mess,” but over the next week or so many of the large logs are expected to removed and turned into lumber, he said.

Those lane closures will shift to different portions of the roadway over the next several months as the focus of tree removal efforts moves along the corridor.

SCDOT assistant construction engineer Lance Strobel said the medians will look much different over the coming months.

While some of the medians in the northern portion of Jasper County will simply be cleared of trees near the roadway, some medians south of mile marker 23 will be seeded and ultimately “look like a nice, natural grass area,” he said.

Wickenhoefer said the department’s hope is to wrap the project up around next April.

“Come springtime, it should look different here and be safer,” he said.

This story was originally published October 2, 2017 at 2:13 PM with the headline "It’s known as South Carolina’s Coffin Corridor. Here’s how $9 million is being used to save lives on I-95.."