A portion of the Outer Ring Road in St. John’s will close for the weekend beginning tonight.

The stretch of highway between Thorburn Road and the Team Gushue Highway will close at 6 p.m., and will reopen 6 a.m. Monday.

There may be some lane reductions in the area throughout the day as the contractor moves equipment onto the site.

The shutdown is to facilitate culvert replacements in the area.

Transportation Minister Barry Petten says there were two options for the work: either reduce traffic to one lane in either direction, which could cause significant backlogs, or shut the road down entirely.

He believes the latter is the best approach, noting that they did something similar for work on Pitts Memorial over the Thanksgiving weekend and it worked well.