Yankton Press & Dakotan: SDDOT Repair Project Scheduled For Shifting Hillside Near Highway 46
A landslide repair project has been scheduled for next month to resolve the issue of a gradually eroding hillside along a short stretch of South Dakota Highway 46 between Mayfield and Irene in northeast Yankton County.
That is according to Greg Rothschadl, Yankton area engineer for the South Dakota Department of Transportation (SDDOT. He told the Press & Dakotan about the project after the SDDOT presented its annual tentative Statewide Transportation Improvement Program to regional leaders, including area government officials, on Tuesday in Yankton.
Texas-based Digg Commercial, LLC, is the prime contractor on the project after the SDDOT accepted the company’s low total bid amount of more than $877,300 on April 15. The only other bid for the work was more than $1.154 million and came from Midwest Contracting, LLC; the SDDOT did not list the state where this business is based.
“They were the low bidder on the job, and we take the low bidder,” Rothschadl said of Digg Commercial.
He said the project is scheduled to start sometime during the week after the Fourth of July holiday weekend. The work is expected to take at least a month and a half to complete and will include the installation of an underground water drainage system.
“We’re going to remove all the old, saturated dirt, put an underdrain system in and then put the dirt back in,” Rothschadl said. “It’s an underdrain system just to drain the groundwater out, just like you see in a farmer’s field. They put underdrains in their fields to drain the water out.”
The area of concern is located on the south side of the paved two-lane Highway 46 between 445th and 446th Avenues.
“There might be times when there’s a flagger if they’re unloading equipment or something, but the road will not be closed,” Rothschadl said.
Starting in 2022, Highway 46 was reconstructed from U.S. Highway 81 to the community of Irene, followed by the completion of major construction the next year and finished with final surfacing in 2024.
Rothschadl previously told the Press & Dakotan that the cause of the slow-moving landslide was likely an underground spring.
“The spring water loaded the newly placed embankment with water, and the weight of the water in the dirt and the reduced friction caused by the water led to the dirt sliding down the hill,” he said.
Marcel Kathol is the rural Irene farmer who previously told the Press & Dakotan about his concerns regarding the creeping land, which is situated at the north end of about 260 acres of agricultural property — crop and pastureland — that the 63-year-old has rented since 2012 from the family of the late Ron Fystro, whom Kathol was good friends with and thought of as a father figure.
Kathol — along with Fystro’s daughter Amy Hoines and her husband, David, of Sioux Falls, who are part-owners of the land Kathol rents on the south side of Highway 46 — met with SDDOT officials last October at the site of the slowly collapsing hillside to show them what was happening and discuss what could be done about the issue.
“Why did it take so long?” Kathol said when informed on Tuesday about the landslide repair project scheduled for next month near Highway 46. “It was so dry in April and May, it could have been done already, and they could have been up and gone. ... There isn’t any way in heck they’re going to be done in August.”
He first noticed the shifting hillside after the region was drenched with heavy rainfall in June 2024. He then tried to contact SDDOT officials in both Pierre and Yankton shortly after that about his concerns; however, he said he had no luck getting in touch with anyone at first.
Kathol eventually got in contact with the SDDOT’s Yankton Area Office and made officials there aware of the slowly collapsing side of the hill near Highway 46, a major travel artery between the Yankton area and Sioux Falls.
He said he felt the state agency should have started immediately taking care of this issue in 2024.
“I’m pretty sick of it, actually, because it should have been done a long time ago,” Kathol said. “They say they aren’t going to shut the road down (during the project), which is hard for me to believe.”
He said he has shared his concerns with area South Dakota legislators — as well as Gov. Larry Rhoden — and Yankton County officials multiple times about the cracked ground, which has slowly crept its way into Clay Creek at the bottom of the hill and tipped over trees on the slope.
Kathol expressed his frustrations during a May forum that was held in Yankton for Republican candidates running for seats up for election on the Yankton County Commission.
“I spoke my piece,” he said. “I unloaded on them.”
The shifting hillside has impacted barbed wire fences that are installed there to keep Kathol’s herd of black Angus cows and Hereford bulls from escaping the pastureland and ending up in places where they should not be, like Highway 46.
“I’m like, ‘Are you going to take some more land that I’m trying to graze here?’” he said, referring to the SDDOT and the landslide repair project. “I have a lot of questions. It’s been a dry summer, and I need every piece of grass I can get (for the cattle). I don’t know what to do, and I’m just waiting to see what’s going to happen.”
One of the projects that SDDOT officials talked about during the state agency’s meeting on Tuesday focused on erosion repair work that is set to occur in 2027 on Highway 46 near where the landslide repair project is going to take place starting next month.
Rothschadl said the two Highway 46 projects are unrelated, even though they will be located near each other. The work scheduled for next year has an estimated cost of about $1.173 million.
“When we had the major flood in 2024, it damaged multiple areas,” he said. “These are smaller areas that we’re going to fix with that (2027) project — just erosion outside the roadway.”