WAGONER — Stanley Young drives over the Richard D. Newkirk bridge on Oklahoma 51 east of Wagoner several times a month.

Each time, he worries about his safety.

“There is a bump — it will rattle your teeth,” Young said. “It doesn’t matter what you are driving either. There are lots of potholes in it. It is in bad shape.”

Young said he slows down as he crosses the bridge, but worries that the drivers he is meeting may not know how rough the bridge is and that one of them might veer into oncoming traffic.

Meredith Zehr of Wagoner recalled a time last year when there was “a hole as big as an oversized washtub” in the bridge surface.

The bridge has problems, but none that are life-threatening, said Darren Saliba, district highway engineer.

“It’s not dangerous — it’s very, very, very high maintenance,” he said.

It requires constant patching where holes come in the concrete, Saliba said.

Those holes often leave nothing but the concrete reinforcement rods between cars and the water below, but there is no imminent danger, he said.

Cyrina Lang said there may be no imminent danger to traffic on the bridge — but being under the bridge may be another story.

“Parts of it are coming apart,” Lang said. “I sure wouldn’t fish under it like I used to.”

Saliba said highway department crews respond as quickly as possible to reports there are holes in the surface.

As far as the bridge surface — the deck — goes, the Newkirk bridge is one of the worst in the eight-county Oklahoma Department of Transportation Division 1, he said.

The bridge carries about 4,000 vehicles per day, with 16 percent of that being truck traffic, Saliba said.

Bridge inspectors have given the bridge a sufficiency rating of 46.2, Saliba said. It is classed as functionally obsolete.