Emergency Closure of Marquette Interchange Ramp Causes Headaches and Heartburn

The (relatively) newly completed rebuild of the Marquette Interchange faces a serious design flaw, closing an entrance ramp earlier tonight. A concrete column cap has developed cracks, forcing emergency closure of the ramp that feeds 15,000 cars to southbound I-43 from downtown Milwaukee.

A spokesman from the Wisconsin DOT and from HNTB, consulting engineers on the project, said at a press conference that the ramp is in no danger of falling down but the closure is being made for public safety. The DOT spokesman says the cracks are a result of a design flaw and that the entire cost of the repair will be bourne by the design firm. No one is venturing a guess as to how long the ramp will be closed.

Backups during the afternoon rush hour Sept 2
are indicative of what the next several months
will be like as the ramp is repaired.
Image from Wisconsin DOT.

The Marquette Interchange reopened to traffic on August 19, 2008, ahead of schedule, after being rebuilt over a period of four years. The "design flaw" is a major concern to the DOT, commuters and taxpayers.

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Wrightstown Bridge Scheduled for Replacement

The Green Bay Press-Gazette has reported that the Wisconsin DOT will replace the Wrightstown Bridge. Construction of the new bridge will be just to the south of the current span. The report says 11 homes and 9 businesses will be destroyed to fascilitate building the new span.

The new bridge will cost an estimated $29 million and will include rounadabouts at each end and will include bicycle paths.

Link: Green Bay Press-Gazette: New Wrightstown bridge to go south of old bridge.

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Wrap-up of the Historic Bridge Weekend

Rain showers, cattle crossings, dropped cameras, and security guards weren't enough to put a damper on last week's Historic Bridge Weekend in Pittsburgh. Here are some random photos from the event.

Bridges in Pennsylvania are dropping like flies, as evidenced by this summer's loss of the Kreitz Road Bridge and the soon-to-be-demolished Venango Veterans Bridge, Mead Avenue Bridge, Hulton Bridge and more. There is hope, however, thanks to the precedent set by Nate Clark in saving the Quaker Bridge.

Thanks to Todd Wilson for organizing the first two Historic Bridge Weekends. Rumor has it that the third event will be held next July in St. Louis, Missouri. Like Pennsylvania, Missouri's historic bridge population is dwindling rapidly.

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National Bridge Inventory software

The National Bridge Inventory is a nationwide database of bridges that carry traffic on public roads, based on inspection data submitted by each state. Despite its many flaws, oddities, and omissions, the NBI has formed the backbone for Bridgehunter.com's database.

After years of arguing that disclosure of the NBI would be a "national security risk", the Federal Highway Administration posted the database online a few years ago. However, like many public data sources, it's in a very inconvenient format, in this case featuring fixed-width ASCII text columns that represent bleeding-edge technology... for 1983.

I've spent a fair amount of "quality" time working with the NBI data. As a result, I'm happy to announce OVERPASS, a new program for converting the raw ASCII text format files into something more useful. (No surprise, OVERPASS is a acronym: Online Versatile Engine Reporting, Presenting, And Studying Spans).

You can download it here. It requires the Perl programming language and access to a command line, so this isn't for newbies. However, it's straightforward to convert each state into a CSV file suitable for importing into Excel, OpenOffice Calc, Access, or the spreadsheet/database program of your choice.

To use the program, first run overpass --help to see a help screen that shows all of the options. Then you'll do something like overpass mo09.txt > mo09.csv to make the conversion.

Hopefully the FHWA will eventually make the NBI available in a more user-friendly format. Until then, if you're a serious bridgehunter, the OVERPASS program is available to turn the NBI into something half-way useful.

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LandmarkHunter.com is live

After a few weeks of beta-testing and squashing embarrassing bugs, our companion website, LandmarkHunter.com, is now up and running. (Hopefully any remaining bugs aren't as embarrassing.)

The new site follows the same basic design, with listings organized by state and then county. Instead of just bridges and tunnels, it has nearly everything under the sun. While the new site does have pages for bridges that are on the National Register of Historic Places, the Bridgehunter.com site will remain the primary database for bridge information and photos.

If you signed up for a Bridgehunter.com editor's account before June 1, then you should already have a login on LandmarkHunter.com with the same username and password. The editing system is very similar, but there's a help page available with more details.

Enjoy!

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Would you like to take a survey?

Jason Smith is conducting a survey for an upcoming conference "on the attitudes of people towards places of historic interest, focusing on historic bridges." If you'd like to participate, here is the questionnaire (Word document) which you can email to JDSmith77@gmx.net.

For German speakers, here's a German version. Die internationale Version erhalten Sie hier. Es ist auf Englisch und Deutsch.

Update July 20: The survey has been updated with clarifications to some of the questions. The deadline is now July 30 so Jason Smith will have time to tabulate the results for his presentation at the Historic Bridge Weekend in Pittsburgh on August 20-22.

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Get ready for LandmarkHunter.com

As I mentioned earlier, I'm working on a companion website called LandmarkHunter.com that will feature various landmarks that are not bridges. I'm in the process of importing data from the National Register of Historic Places, a major undertaking with almost 90,000 records. Categorizing these landmarks is a monster job, and the NRHP is only the first phase. I'm also going to be grabbing data from the HABS/HAER projects, USGS placenames file, and post office records.

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Wrap-up of Tennessee flood damage

Two years ago, flash floods wiped out historic bridges in Iowa and Missouri. Then flooding in March of this year caused havoc in Rhode Island. While those events were bad enough, the May 1-2 flood in Tennessee has taken the cake for destruction.

Described as an "unprecedented" flood in Nashville history, the deluge wiped out several historic truss bridges in Central Tennessee:

• Centerville Bridge, Hickman County, a 1913 two-span Pratt through truss: Completely destroyed
• Old TN 100 Bridge, Davidson County, a relocated 1889 Parker through truss: Completely destroyed
• Hurricane Mills Bridge, Humphreys County, a 1911 Pratt through truss: Completely destroyed
• Tanksley Bridge, Humphreys County, a 1904 two-span Camelback through truss: One span completely destroyed
• Kettle Mill Bridge, Maury County, a 1904 Pennsylvania through truss: Approach span destroyed. The main span survived (barely), but a Pratt pony truss approach was wiped out, even though the bridge sits on very tall Lally columns. The sheer amount of water that passed through here must have seemed biblical.

I have an ugly feeling that there are other bridges to add to the list...

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Good news roundup

Instead of the usual parade of bad news about bridge demolitions and disasters, here's a roundup of positive historic bridge preservation news.

• Hendricks County, Indiana, has successfully relocated a rare bolted Warren through truss to the McCloud Nature Park. A grand opening will be celebrated May 21-23. Nathan Holth forwarded this PDF of the event's brochure.
• Volunteers are working to restore an 1885 Whipple truss in Glenville, West Virginia. One of the approach spans collapsed in February, but the newspaper story says that the entire bridge "could be fairly easily rehabilitated."
• An 1880s-era pony truss in Pennsylvania has been saved! The catch is that the bridge was relocated across the border to Delaware, but a victory is a victory.
• County officials are still trying to find funding to rehabilitate the Devils Elbow truss bridge on Route 66 in Missouri. So far, they have been able to land a couple of small grants.

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More Street View improvements

Google's Street View is proving to be extremely useful, but also painfully addictive. I've added the ability to show multiple Street View perspectives for a single bridge. Here are a couple of examples:

Brooklyn Bridge: http://bridgehunter.com/ny/kings/brooklyn/

Twelfth Street Bridge in Kansas City, showing the many levels of this three-level structure: http://bridgehunter.com/mo/jackson/twelfth-street/

Just click the tabs next to the Street View widget to switch between views. Note: Even on a fast connection, it usually takes a few seconds to switch views.

If you have an editor's account, you will need to go to the new "Add Street View" page instead of the bridge's edit page in order to add Street View scenes. This new page includes a built-in map and Street View preview tool so that you can track down the best views without the need to go to the Google website and copy-and-paste code.

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