LEWIS COUNTY, Wash. - New numbers from the Washington State Department of Transportation list 138 state owned bridges as structurally deficient.
WSDOT says those bridges are safe to travel, but are in need of repairs and in some cases outright replacement. As of this weekend, one of them is now officially closed. The south Fork Newaukum River Bridge on State Route 508 east of Onalaska is no longer carrying traffic.
State bridge engineers cited safety concerns, after they found too many overweight loads continued to cross the bridge. Since repair work in 2012, the bridge was weight restricted to just seven tons. That means a full sized pickup with a loaded horse trailer could be enough to cause a collapse.
The builder's plate on the bridge lists a date of 1930, for the steel pony-truss bridge. Some bridge experts with WSDOT's Southwest Region says the bridge might not have been opened until 1934. From the top it looks bad, with rust, flaking paint and some serious impact damage from old accidents. But underneath it's a lot worse. In some cases you can see support stringers rusted all the way through.
"Once a bridge gets as old as this bridge, there's now really nothing you can do," said Mike London, southwest regional bridge superintendent.
The temporary solution is to assemble a one lane, temporary Bailey bridge across it. The state maintains a stock of World War II vintage Bailey bridge parts. The modular bridge sections can be assembled in various ways to make bridges of different lengths and to carry more weight. During the war these bridges helped allied tanks pursue the Nazis. But even though they're almost as old as the bridge they're replacing, they spend most of their time in storage out of the weather.
Design work on a new bridge is expected to start soon, but it is not known if there will be money in the budget to actually construct a new bridge.
