BAYLOR COUNTY (KFDX/KJTL) — A deadly Greyhound bus crash in 2020 left many people in Baylor County wanting safer roads at Highway 82 and FM 1790.

“My thought was, what if that had been one of the school buses?” Seymour Helping Hands member Kimberly Stevenson said.

Kelly Fest stepped up, starting a petition which drew over a thousand signatures.

“I expected maybe 500,” Fest said. “I didn’t expect a thousand. That’s a lot was a lot for speed for Seymour and Baylor county. There’s only 3700 people in the whole county, so that was a lot. And that’s a third of our population now.”

With the help of others to gather names and gather data to back the need for an overpass, the project is ready to go and has people in Baylor County excited.

“It’s a wonderful step toward it,” Stevenson said. “You know, there’s a lot of things that can cause an accident. And that intersection right there is very easy to be looking in [another] direction to miss something coming. Having that overpass will allow the traffic to go over and under and not a lot. No, no collision area at all. That should pretty much cut them down, hopefully to no more accidents.”

Though the project won’t start this year according to the TX-DOT Project Tracker, community member June Hrncirik knows with time, it will come.

“My husband had told me two or three days ago, he says, you know we live out there and we use that road all the time, and every time we go to Wichita,” Hrncirik said. “And he says he don’t think we’ll ever see it. And then all of a sudden she calls and says that it’s funded so I was very excited.”

What started as a grassroots project turned into an $18.8 million project for the county. As Seymour Mayor Mark McCord said, it’s people taking care of people.

“These ladies over here see these things and make the effort to do something, and it’s not an easy task,” McCord said. “We finally got the attention of TX-dot and the state of Texas and it’s paid off.”

For more information on Seymour Helping Hands, visit their Facebook page.