Bridge deck crumbling

By Liz McMahan
Assistant City Editor

July 13, 2008 01:01 am

— 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.
Neither the rating nor the classification means the bridge is unsafe, according to definitions from a Federal Highway Safety subcommittee Web site.
The sufficiency rating is an overall measure of the bridge’s condition and used to determine eligibility for federal funds.
A functionally obsolete bridge is one that does not have adequate lane widths, shoulder widths or vertical clearances, according to the Web site.
More than 500 (38 percent) of all Oklahoma’s bridges are classed as functionally obsolete, according to a 2005 “report card” issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The Newkirk bridge has 12-foot-wide lanes, which are narrow for today’s traffic, Saliba said.
Cyrina Lang of Wagoner said her pickup mirrors were hit by an oncoming vehicle a couple of years or so ago. She said the narrow lanes, together with the rough surface, make her consider the bridge risky for traffic.
“The deck is really where the heartache is,” Saliba said. “It’s a truss bridge, and those truss bridges are pretty stout. It’s just due to lack of painting and just the years of service on that bridge.”
The bridge, named for former District 1 Engineer Richard Newkirk, is 1,127 feet long and was built in 1949 at a cost of $724,325.
It will cost considerably more than that — $30 million or more — to replace the bridge, Saliba said.
“We hope to start buying right of way within the year,” Saliba said.
The work is scheduled to begin in 2011.
The Grand River bridge is one of 480 bridges in the state scheduled for replacement by 2014, according to a 2007 study by TRIP, a nonprofit organization that researches, evaluates and distributes data on highway tranportation issues. The report says 426 other bridges are scheduled for repairs by 2014.
“It’s a very costly project, but absolutely necessary,” Saliba said.
An environmental impact study already has begun on the project and is nearing completion, he said. A public hearing will finalize the study.
Then, engineers will design the project and right-of-way acquisition will begin, he said.
Before construction of the Grand River bridge begins, the approaches to the bridge must be widened, he said. That will involve bringing in rock and building a “fill” that will withstand being below the lake level and that will have enough elevation to accommodate traffic no matter what the lake’s level.
That project will begin at Taylor Ferry and probably will extend to the Sequoyah State Park entrance, Saliba said.
The bridge replacement project will begin with construction immediately south of the existing bridge. Once that’s complete, all traffic will shift to the new bridge, which will carry all of the traffic until the existing bridge is replaced to serve the westbound traffic, Saliba said.

Reach Liz McMahan at 918-684-2926 orClick Here to Send Email

Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.