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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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."
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.
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:
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.
The Wisconsin DOT reopened northbound US 45 through the Zoo Interchange at 1:00 AM this morning. The old bridge, closed because of structural difficulties, was replaced by a new bridge that was built parallel to the old one. US 45 was supposed to be closed until Memorial Day.
Construction officials said that nice weather and a stepped up schedule allowed the new bridge to be completed ahead of schedule.
Citizens are skeptical of the story and controversy continues to rage over the surprise closing of the old bridge and sudden opening of the new span.
Either way, northbound US 45 is open and the so-called "Barrett Bypass" is now closed. Work continues on two other bridges in the interchange that are being replaced. Officials say those bridges will be completed by Memorial Day, as originally planned.
New York City has announced plans to demolish the obsolete Brooklyn Bridge to make room for a
modern replacement. The worn out bridge, with a sufficiency rating of 0 out of 100, simply isn't able to cope with modern traffic demands.
A spokeswoman for New York City's Division of Bridges is quoted in today's newspaper saying, "The bridge's
superstructure, substructure, and deck were all rated as poor during the last inspection. Meanwhile, it includes
a stiffening truss that is remarkably similar to the truss on the I-35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis.
We have no choice but to start over and replace the Brooklyn Bridge with a modern, safer design."
We now have photos of 10,000 bridges! Last week, Anthony Dillon posted
the 10,000th photographed bridge, the New Ford Bridge
in Indiana. In case anybody is wondering, we currently have pages for 33,616 bridges with a total
of 57,617 photos.
I must confess that I've become addicted to Google Street View. For those parts of the country with Street View coverage,
it sure beats driving, fighting traffic, spending money on gas, and trying to find a safe place to park. It's been very helpful
for finding railroad bridges that are not in the National Bridge Inventory. Meanwhile, Bing.com
offers a nice "Birds Eye View" that can help identify bridges, although it appears that Bing only allows linking, and not embedding,
the Birds Eye imagery.
By popular demand, I've started working on a companion website, landmarkhunter.com, for all types of historic and notable landmarks.
Don't get too excited, the site's launch is probably several months away. In the meantime, what kinds of landmarks are you most interested
in? Round barns, lighthouses, water towers, fire towers, abandoned roads, courthouses, mills, dams?
Fearing collapse, the Wisconsin DOT today closed the bridge that carries northbound US 45 traffic through the Zoo Interchange. The bridge is one of three in the interchange that are being replaced by bridges that are already under emergency construction. (See Wisconsin Bridges To Be Replaced in Three Weekends in Bridge News, November 20, 2009.)
To avoid the bridge, traffic is being re-routed to eastbound I-94, off the freeway at 84th Street, back on to I-94 westbound from 84th Street, and on to the ramp carrying traffic to northbound 45.
An inspection of the bridge on Thursday evening, March 25, revealed that a cracks in the concrete support members had expanded and lengthened. The inspection resulted in the decision to close the bridge on Friday morning. The bridge was closed for fear of an overweight truck collapsing the span, according to WisDOT officials.
The red marking shows the bridge that has been closed. Traffic will be routed to eastbound I-94, off on 84th Street (not shown) and back to westbound I-94 to return to northbound US 45.
Approximately 350,000 vehicles per day use the interchange, making it the highest volume interchange in the state of Wisconsin. The bridge will remain closed until replacement is complete, scheduled for Memorial Day. The impact of this closing is immeasurable, on traffic, bus routes, commuting and economic considerations.
DOT officials are saying the closure is due to overweight trucks, however, the rebuild of the Zoo Interchange has been a political football for over a decade, with the repairs to the structures delayed and postponed numerous times while the deterioration of the structures continued.
For example, in a letter dated June 28, 2005, City of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett went on record with State Senators Dale Schultz and Judith Robson that he was against spending any money on preliminary engineering on the proposed Zoo Interchange reconstruction. In his conclusion, he said, "Unlike the Marquette Interchange, the Zoo Interchange will stand long enough for us to resolve these issues."
I find it a bit disconcerting that Google seems to be taking over so much critical Internet infrastructure.
And yet, it's hard to argue with the quality and sheer usefulness of their services.
Street View
The coverage available on Google Street View continues to rapidly expand, and now even inclues rural
areas in some parts of the country. Take, for example, this bridge
along a bypassed stretch of Route 66 in New Mexico. Based on the NBI data and satellite imagery, it appeared that this
road was abandoned, but the Street View car made it down the road.
If you have an editor's account, you can now embed the Street View tool within the page for a bridge. First, track down
the best Street View position and camera angle, and then copy the URL from the Google website (click the "Link" button at the top right).
Edit the bridge and look for the "Street View" box where you can paste the link.
I've created a category, Have street view, listing the bridges
that have an embedded Street View widget.
News Archive
Almost as amazing as Street View, Google has been quietly scanning the historical archives of newspapers
and making them available for free in one big searchable database
under the umbrella of Google News. It's quite clever: the printed newspaper pages are treated similar to Google Maps, with
the ability to zoom and pan.
Old newspapers are excellent for tracking down information and sometimes photos of lost bridges. From my hometown newspaper,
I was able to find photos of historic bridges before they were replaced with UCEBs: see
here,
here
and here. The newspaper
photographed many interesting disasters and wrecks, including
here,
here,
and here.
Other tidbits include a reprint of an early state highway map explaining the
meanings of route shields (notice how US 66 was prematurely labeled as US 60 on this map) and
an item from 1960 explaining how freeway interchanges work.
Even if a local newspaper isn't available on Google, it may be possible to find wire (filler) stories about bridges
elsewhere, such as this front-page photo
describing the Spiral Bridge at Hastings, Minnesota, as a "freak."
The Street View and Google News Archive tools provide more then enough material to keep a researcher busy for a lifetime. And that
doesn't include the other stuff that Google already has...
The owners of the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado have made a lot of money from tourists visiting the "highest bridge in the world" and staring down at the Arkansas River 1,053 feet below.
Except that the bridge isn't 1,053 feet high. And it's no longer the world's highest bridge. It's not even second.
Eric Sakowski of HighestBridges.com ranks the Royal Gorge Bridge as
the 11th highest bridge in the world, although three of the bridges are
under construction and haven't been completed yet.
The Royal Gorge Bridge quietly lost its title in 2001 thanks to a massive highway building program in China. It was first trumped by
the Liuguanghe Bridge at 975 ft. high. Last year, on Nov. 15th,
the Siduhe River Bridge opened and set the new world record at 1,550 ft. high.
Meanwhile, despite the tourist brochures stating otherwise,
the Royal Gorge is not over a thousand feet high. The exact figure
is still open to debate, but is well short of the 1,053 figure that everybody knows. Using a laser rangefinder, Eric Sakowski measured the height of the deck above the Arkansas River as 955 ft. Walt Lambert, engineer for the bridge's rehabilitation in 1983-84, reported a height of 968.4 ft.
After hearing about the HighestBridges.com website, officials at Royal Gorge recently took their own measurements and came up with a figure of 969 ft. I bet they aren't too thrilled about this revelation.
The Colorado Springs Gazette quotes a spokeswoman for the bridge saying that the 1,053 figure was probably measured to the top of the towers. She said, "As far as we know, we're sticking with our 1,053 feet over the river."
However, if "height to the top of the towers" is the accepted measurement, then this means that the Royal Gorge is still trumped by another bridge, the Millau Viaduct in France with one tower rising over 1,100 feet.
I must confess a certain amount of glee about the Royal Gorge Bridge getting its comeuppance. I refuse to pay $24 per person
just to visit a bridge, even if the ticket includes admission to other attractions. Come to think of it, Royal Gorge might hold
the record as the world's most expensive toll bridge.
The height isn't the only problem with the bridge's
reported measurements. During the 1980s rehabilitation, Walt Lambert
discovered that the length of the main span was actually
longer than everyone thought. The span length had always been accepted as 880 feet, a figure that the original designer, George Cole, had used in a 1930 article about the bridge.
The actual measurement is 938 feet, a number confirmed by Eric Sakowski using a rangefinder and then later by spot-checking with a tape measure.
Reportedly, George Cole's brother performed the original site survey
and erroneously measured a distance of 880 feet between the proposed towers. The error wasn't discovered until after the towers were built. Cole covered for his brother and pretended that the length was 880 feet. In order to pay for the extra decking required by the longer span, it was necessary to fudge the accounting numbers and add bogus cost overruns to the steel used in the towers.
It's amazing that Cole was able to maintain the cover-up for so long,
but nobody had any reason to question him. He built the darn thing, after all.
Now that the Royal Gorge Bridge has been scrutinized, I wonder what
other famous bridges harbor engineering secrets? Has anybody independently verified the length of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway?
I received a request to post a job opening for a "Historic Bridge
Specialist" at the Massachusetts Department of Transportation in Boston.
Here it is.
Also in Massachusetts, an ugly battle is brewing
over the fate of an 1894 footbridge in the Boston suburb of Brookline.
The bridge, built as part of a park system by famed architect Frederick Law Olmsted,
is slated to be rehabilitated and reopened to pedestrians. However, some
local residents have been particularly outspoken against the plan, arguing
that the bridge would attract more crime. It would be interesting to ask
the opponents to find an example of another rehabilitated bridge in the U.S. that has caused
a crime problem. I doubt that they could.
The latest round of federal stimulus funding, announced Feb. 17,
includes even more historic bridge demolition/replacement projects (see the list
here in PDF form). Officials from Maine and New Hampshire applied
for stimulus money to rehabilitate and save the Memorial Bridge at Portsmouth,
NH, but their application was denied. If their proposal had said "tear
down and replace" instead of "rehabilitate", I wonder if it would have been approved?
Engineers at Cottage Grove, Oregon, are scrambling to find a way
to save the Chambers Covered Railroad Bridge,
the only remaining covered railroad bridge in Oregon (and one of the few anywhere).
The bridge is leaning precariously after a January windstorm; it could
collapse at any time.
For those who have an editor's account, I've recently added some new tools throughout the site:
The Add bridge from map page lets you find the location
of a bridge without knowing the county ahead of time. Use the Google Maps widget to track down the bridge site, either by searching
or by zooming in. You can move the marker anywhere (left click to drag it, or right click to make it jump elsewhere). Once you've
found the right spot, the system will try to determine the appropriate county and let you add the bridge there.
You can also add a bridge by going to the National Bridge Inventory maps for each county.
First, go to the main county page and click the "Import from NBI" button. Then look for the "View map" button in the top right corner.
This will take you to an interactive "Exhibit" map showing the location of all of the NBI bridges with known GPS coordinates.
The coordinates are frequently wrong -- sometimes they show up in the wrong state or even country -- but the map can help track down
a particular bridge if all you know is the location.
The Satellite and Street View features of Google Maps can be very useful to determine the current status of a bridge. On each bridge page,
I've added an "Enlarge" button that blows up the map to make it easier to use the Satellite view. I've also included a link for
viewing the location on Street View. Of course, many locations have not been visited by Google's Army of Privacy-Invading Photographers,
in which case you will only see an ordinary map. If the location is available on Street View, you may need to rotate the camera angle, as it always begins
pointing due north.
I've added a Flash Upload tool to replace the buggy Java Upload tool. However, the Flash version seems to be just as buggy. I still
recommend stashing your photos into a single ZIP file and uploading that using the standard upload page. You may also consider importing
your photos from another website.
If, by some miracle, you actually have time to kill, I've created a To-Do List page
that shows the bridges on the website that need attention or updating.
Warning: The following discussion is extremely geeky and not suitable for some audiences.
We all know the situation. You find a truss bridge that is well-preserved, except for one little detail: the plaques are missing, leaving only dangling mounting brackets to taunt you. Meanwhile, county records are spotty or non-existent, destroyed by the Great Courthouse Fire of Aught-Something.
How do you track down the history of the bridge? If you're lucky, the bridge has a distinctive feature that ties it to a particular company (like the 'X' scrollwork used by the Canton Bridge Co. above the portal). Otherwise, the design of the bridge will likely give a vague idea about the time frame, but probably not much else.
For through truss bridges, however, the arrangement of the portal bracing can yield important clues about the bridge's origin and builder.
Last week, I speculated that the stimulus money awarded for high-speed
rail projects might have the pleasant side effect of saving the Katy
Bridge at Boonville, Missouri.
Today it was announced that the bridge's present owner, Union Pacific, will turn over the bridge to the City of Boonville for future rehabilitation into a pedestrian/bicycle crossing as part of the Katy Trail.
Restoring the bridge will be expensive, but a good chunk of the cost
can be covered by private donations already pledged
to the Save the Katy Bridge Coalition. With the threat of demolition apparently removed,
the restoration doesn't have to be completed all at once.
The tunnel at nearby Rocheport attracts a tremendous number
of tourists each year to the Katy Trail (just try finding a parking spot in Rocheport during a nice summer weekend). After the bridge is restored, Boonville will replace Rocheport as the number one landmark along the entire Katy Trail. The project, dare I say it, could be quite a boon to Boonville.
Update Friday, Feb. 5: Here's an updated story from the Boonville Daily News.
A few months ago I mentioned a ridiculous story from New Jersey about local
officials refusing to release the engineering assessment for a rural truss bridge
because of "national and local security reasons."
I didn't realize that there was even more ridiculousness involved. Mercer
County wanted to build a replacement bridge intentionally designed
with a 4-ton weight limit to keep big trucks away from using the road.
"We're determined to build a bridge that's safe and secure for emergency vehicles," said Mercer County Executive Brian Hughes. "The residents are afraid it will become a cut-through for truck traffic to Route 31, but we've already lowered the weight requirement to four tons (on the proposed bridge), so that's not a valid argument."
As I've said before, you can't make this stuff up. The county intended
to replace a bridge with a 3-ton weight limit (before it was closed)
with a bridge with a 4-ton weight limit. Brilliant! I didn't realize
that extra ton could make such a difference for safely supporting fire trucks.
Mercer County has dropped that silly idea and will now build a standard UCEB without any built-in obsolescence.
Local opposition to the new bridge is fierce, as it will likely obliterate the site along Jacobs Creek where George Washington nearly fell to his death, a pivotal moment in American history. The bridge debate reportedly changed the outcome of the last township election.
The old bridge, a rare 1882 wrought-iron through truss by the King Bridge Company,
is slated to be relocated and preserved at a local park. I'll believe it when I see it.
Today's announcement by the White House to spend $8 billion on
high-speed rail projects might provide an unexpected bonus: the preservation of the Boonville Railroad Bridge. Until now, Union Pacific, the owner of the bridge, has intended to reuse some of the approach spans for a new bridge at Osage City, Missouri.
Missouri will receive $31 million in rail stimulus grants, much of which
is earmarked to construct a new bridge at Osage City. Since it now
appears Union Pacific won't need to recycle the Boonville Bridge, it seems possible that the bridge can be saved.
Of course, there's still the small matter of battling the Coast Guard,
which considers the bridge a hazard to navigation on the Missouri River.
Money will also need to be raised to restore and operate the bridge
for pedestrian/bicycle use.
With so many bridges over the Missouri River dropping like flies lately,
hopefully this significant bridge can be saved while filling an ugly
gap in the Katy Trail.
One of the major goals of this website is to categorize bridges by a wide variety of things: their design, status,
builders, location, and more. For truss bridges, the design types (Pratt, Howe, Warren, etc.) are fairly well established, but not completely. Sources don't always agree about the design for a particular bridge. Engineers liked to experiment, producing oddball
designs that don't quite fit within the standard categories. Other times, the design might be fairly common, but lies within
a grey area that makes it hard to classify.
Here are some examples that I've pulled from this site. How would you classify these bridges?
"The bridge was meant for commerce. It's not meant to be a museum." -- State Sen. J. Barry Stout, D-Bentleyville, Pennsylvania
"[D]eveloping a one-lane rural bridge museum just isn't as high a priority as some of these other items we're dealing with." -- Al Forsberg, engineer for Blue Earth County, Minnesota
Here we have two different bridges in two different states, the Charleroi-Monessen Bridge of Pennsylvania and the Dodd Ford Bridge of Minnesota. The opponents of preserving these National Register bridges were both quoted in newspapers this week using the same talking point, scoffing at the notion of treating these bridges as "museums."
With the receipt of a $240,000 federal grant, the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Chartiers is on track to complete a 2-mile-long trolley line that will serve as a tourist attraction and shuttle from Country Club Road to the Washington County Fairgrounds.
"Today is an important day in Washington County," said state Sen. J. Barry Stout, the Bentleyville Democrat who shepherded the federal grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to the museum. "Everyone is in love with trains and trolleys. This is an opportunity to have living history."
Funny, isn't it? The Charleroi-Monessen Bridge is an actual historic site, but Stout is only interested in giving money to a museum project that is clearly not historic. (How many solar-powered trolleys were ever built during the 19th Century?)
The situation in Minnesota isn't quite as absurd, as supporters of saving the bridge were able to obtain a small grant to study options for preserving it. Nevertheless, the comment from the county engineer treating "museum" as a dirty word is distressing. It's a shame that modern engineers are only interested in a bridge if it's a massive concrete blob capable of carrying 10,000 SUVs at a time.
It is very difficult to describe the first decade of the third millennium in terms of historic bridges and all the attempts of preserving them, because as was mentioned already, there are many bridge examples that either met the wrecking ball, fell victim to stupidity among the drivers, or were wiped out due to natural disasters. However, I have picked out some of the high- and lowlights that made this decade a "lost decade" for bridge preservation, with the goal of addressing this issue to politicians and other interested alike and finding ways to preserve what is left to preserve before they are gone forever. This decade is pretty much a clean slate to right the wrongs committed a decade earlier. For each category, I picked out the top three examples with some comments to go along with that. I hope in the future that my picks will take place at the beginning of each year as a way of looking back at what was accomplished in terms of historic bridge preservation and which bridge met its unnecessary doom. So without further ado, here it goes:
For New Years Day, I was going to write a retrospective of the last decade. But since most of the last 10 years involved bulldozing, blowing up, demolishing, condemning, annihilating, pulverizing, obliterating, or wiping out historic bridges to make way for ugly replacements, a Decade In Review article didn't sound like much fun.
So, I've been working on new features for the website. Succumbing to peer pressure, I've added Bridgehunter.com to YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook:
I've added tools to allow embedding YouTube videos on each bridge page. These will appear on the new Videos page.
This site now has some belated social-networking features. If you have an editor's login, you can go to the My Settings page and check "Enable my profile page" to share a biography and list of recent updates you've made.
Check out the new Users page to see who has uploaded the most photos. Yes, that's right, J.R. Manning is in the lead.
If you don't like to wade through listings for modern bridges (built after 1970) or bridges that have been demolished, you can now go to the My Settings page and choose to have those bridges removed or greyed out. If you don't have an editor's account, you can register here.
Opened to pedestrians in October as a New York State Park, the Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge over the Hudson River has turned into a tourist magnet. To borrow an old phrase, "If you restore it, they will come." By rehabilitating the bridge, New York State has been able to turn a dangerous liability into a tourism centerpiece.
When a historic bridge project is proposed, opponents usually scoff at the tourism potential, saying something like, "Nobody will want to come visit a rusty hulk." The reality, as seen in Poughkeepsie and other cities, is that people really do appreciate these projects.
While the design of the replacement bridge has not been selected, an online survey revealed that most people had an unfavorable opinion of the UCEB options (steel girder or segmental concrete). The cable-stayed alternatives didn't fare well, either, leaving a network tied-arch design as the most popular.
Back in February, Missouri made the news by being the first state to take advantage of federal stimulus funding. Unfortunately, the project involved replacing a rare truss bridge with a UCEB, a pattern that has been repeated all year with other stimulus projects.
It's not all hopeless, however. Stimulus finding
has been approved to rehabilitate the Inner Grove Heights Bridge in Minnesota to be used as a pedestrian pier. With the main span across the Mississippi River already demolished, this isn't a clear victory, but at least the money is being used to preserve something instead of tearing down the entire bridge.
On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge between Kanauga, Ohio and Point Pleasant, West Virginia collapsed into the Ohio River. 46 people perished in the disaster.
As a result of the collapse, the National Bridge Inspection Standard was put into effect, mandating that all bridges longer than 20 feet be inspected every two years.
An essay about the bridge, the collapse, and the aftermath has been added to the Silver Bridge listing.
As the centerpiece of Route 66 State Park, it would seem a no-brainer
to preserve this US 66 bridge over the Meramec River. However, the bridge, which
failed an inspection and was closed to traffic just days after getting listed
on the National Register of Historic Places, is now slated to be replaced
by a UCEB when funding becomes available.
It is one of only four remaining deck truss bridges built by the Missouri highway department.
Unfortunately, after the collapse of the Minneapolis I-35W bridge, it seems engineers
have become increasingly paranoid about the safety of deck trusses, justified
or not. In this case, the highway department has
, including pedestrians, for fear that it will collapse.
The Route 66 News website has a
nice overview of the situation.
You'll want to have a barf bag handy when you read the quote
from a state official about how the Missouri Department of Transportation has an "excellent record"
of historic preservation.
2. MKT Trail Bridge No. 12
One of the great things about rail-to-trail projects is that the historic
bridges along the rail corridor are usually saved. After all, a bridge
designed to carry massive locomotives should be more than adequate
for pedestrians and bicyclists.
However, along the MKT Trail in Columbia, carrying pedestrians isn't
good enough. The city wants their trail bridges to be
capable of supporting emergency vehicles.
And so it appears that Bridge No. 12, a pin-connected pony truss,
will be replaced this winter.
Just because a bridge is part of a trail project doesn't make it safe
from being scrapped.
This pony truss bridge in Jasper County on Route D was closed to traffic in October. It's in terrible shape, so I can't fault MoDOT for wanting to build a new bridge next year.
However, MoDOT refuses to consider any offers to reuse the bridge elsewhere. The Joplin Globe reports:
Wendy Brunner-Lewis, spokeswoman for MoDOT, said the department owns the bridge, and it is not for sale. Moving the bridge, she said, would inhibit the contractor's ability to quickly replace it next spring.
The bridge is not considered National Register eligible, and thus MoDOT
is not mandated to offer it for adaptive reuse. However, I disagree
with this assessment. This is a rare example of a truss bridge
that was "grandfathered" into the state highway system. It is possibly
the only polygonal Warren pony truss in Missouri with a wooden deck and laced girders. Its 100-foot span, unusually long for a pony truss, is also noteworthy.
Update Nov. 29: Congratulations to Brian McKee for posting the 50,000th photo. The photo shows the Estep Bridge in Washington County, Pennsylvania.
Bridgehunter.com is on the verge of reaching two major milestones.
In a matter of days, the 50,000th photo will be uploaded to the site. Meanwhile, in the next couple months, we will have photos of 10,000 bridges. It was only this time last year that we were celebrating
the photographing of 5,000 bridges. A hearty thank-you goes to everybody who has uploaded photos or information over the years.
With these milestones on tap, I've been giving some thought to the long-term direction of this website. Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere, but I would like some feedback on the following topics. Feel free to post a forum comment or write a note about these questions:
1. Would you be interested in buying any cheesy quality merchandise?
People have told me in the past, "You need to find a way to make money
on this site!" Money has never been the motivation for this website -- it's been strictly a hobby -- but it would be nice to recoup some of my expenses. I can offer calendars, T-shirts, photo books, photo reprints, etc., if there's enough demand. I am working on a book about the historic bridges of Missouri, but that is still some ways away.
(At this point I would like to direct your attention to the "Make a donation to help pay our hosting bills" link. Hint, hint. Donors receive a free @bridgehunter.com email address.)
2. What new website features would you like to see?
I'm looking to give a facelift to the site design to offer
better navigation tools and search options. Do you have any special
requests for new features or changes? Now is a good time to offer
suggestions: If I'm going to be breaking things, I might as well break things in style!
3. Are you interested in historic sites other than bridges?
In the past, some of you have suggested building companion websites
for non-bridge places, such as lighthouses, round barns, mills, natural
bridges, historic roads, and so on.
The code behind this website, code-named "ponytruss" and written
in the Perl programming language, could be repackaged
to use on other similar websites. Is this worth pursuing?
4. Which do you think we will see first: A cure for cancer, or a cure for Pennsylvania's inability to preserve historic bridges?
The Wisconsin DOT has announced an aggressive plan to replace three seriously deteriorating bridges, located in Wisconsin's busiest freeway interchange, by Memorial Day, 2010. Plans are to use building techniques that replace each bridge over a weekend, to minimize traffic impact.
The interchange, built in 1963, carries upwards of 350,000 vehicles per day. During the summer of 2009, WisDOT detoured large trucks around the interchange because of severe weight limits that were implemented. The interchange, located in western Milwaukee County, carries I-94, I-894, US 41 and US 45.
In a press release, Wisconsin DOT said, "Thorough investigations of the bridges conducted over the past three months show significant deterioration that prompted WisDOT to move forward immediately with plans to build new structures at the three locations."
Requests for proposals are out for ways to accomplish this monumental task. One plan calls for building the bridges at another location and swaping new for old over a weekend.
You can see a video report and more about the aggressive plan on the website of Milwaukee's Fox 6 News.
You may have noticed lately that I've replaced the vicinity maps on the bridge pages with a Google Maps widget. I'm not particularly thrilled with Google Maps, which tend to add a lot of overhead to a website, but the old mapping system was getting too difficult to keep up-to-date with all of the new bridge additions and changes made each day.
As a bonus, I've added an "Exhibit" feature to each state, plus selected categories. Developed by MIT, the Exhibit program is billed as a "publishing framework for data-rich interactive web pages." Don't let the buzzwords scare you, Exhibit is downright cool.
Be sure to explore all of the options, including viewing bridges on the map by status and design, as well as viewing them in gallery or tabular view. Select different categories from the left panel to add and remove bridges from the map.
Exhibit does require a modern browser and a fast computer and Internet connection. For now, it remains an experimental feature and won't replace the standard maps and tables already available on the site.
The Crown Point Bridge over Lake Champlain between New York and Vermont, closed since Oct. 16, will be demolished and replaced by a new bridge. Inspectors found serious cracks in the bridge's piers, leading to the conclusion that it could not be saved.
One engineer is quoted as saying, "I can't ensure that the bridge is not subject to sudden collapse. The foundations were constructed in the 1920s of unreinforced concrete. It's too dangerous to work around and too dangerous to repair."
In most cases, damaging or destroying government property is a serious crime.
Unless, however, it involves driving an overweight or oversized truck across a historic bridge and causing extensive damage.
In Ohio, a delivery truck driver tried to drive across the Newton Falls Covered Bridge, only to smash into the overhead bracing, causing $57,000 worth of damage.
His punishment? A $206 fine for having an "unsafe vehicle," a minor misdemeanor.
Boy, that will teach him! With this kind of enforcement, it's no surprise that we continue to lose bridges to idiots again. And again. And again.
Why bother posting weight limits at all? Or better yet, let's just put up signs that say, "No trucks, unless you really need to cross" or "Weight limit 5 tons, but feel free to damage the bridge so we can claim federal funding for replacing it."
Mercer County, New Jersey, considers an 1882 through truss bridge on a minor county road to be a terrorist target. You can't make this stuff up.
According to The Times of Trenton newspaper, the county refused to hand over an engineering assessment of the bridge under the state's open records law, citing "national and local security reasons."
The local resident who requested the document then asked for a copy from the state's Department of Environmental Protection. They were ready to hand over the report, only to be temporarily overruled by the Attorney General to review a "legal issue."
It seems the AG office couldn't find any justification to continue stalling -- at least not with a straight face -- and has ordered the release of the document. We'll see what happens next.
Another monumental truss bridge over the Missouri River was lost today. The channel span of the cantilevered through truss at Miami, Missouri, was demolished early this morning so that a replacement bridge can be built on the
existing piers.
If the bridge at Glasgow, Missouri, is any indication, the new Miami Bridge will be yet another Ugly Concrete Eyesore Bridge (UCEB). When the replacement Glasgow Bridge opened in September, motorists were greeted with a mundane bridge that was only a few feet wider than its historic predecessor.
I visited Glasgow the day after the new bridge opened, only to find a traffic jam as an oversized tractor tried to cross, blocking both lanes. Featuring narrow shoulders, no pedestrian walkway, and a dangerous intersection at the foot of the east approach, the new Glasgow Bridge hardly seems worth the effort. The only silver lining is that the highway bridge doesn't detract (much) from the adjacent historic railroad bridge.
Chris Dunne sent word of a most unusual bridge in England facing immediate demolition. The Bowstring Bridge (also called Braunstone Gate Bridge) in Leicester is a wrought-iron Whipple (double-intersection) through truss that has a curved upper chord and vertical endposts.
That alone would make it rare and precious, but the abutments are skewed in opposite directions so that one truss is 52.7 meters in length while the other side is only 39.5 meters. Despite the peculiar design and community support for preservation, the Bowstring Bridge is about to be demolished to make way for a swimming pool at an adjacent college campus. (Work is already underway to remove the decking.)
I haven't been able to locate any examples of bridges in the U.S. with either a polygonal Whipple truss or with trusses that have radically different lengths on either side. Have any such bridges ever been built on this side of the Atlantic?
The Kansas State Historical Society has launched a website where you can search a database of structures in Kansas, including bridges, that were surveyed to determine whether or not they met the criteria for the NRHP. If you ignore the
category "bridge type" and just search under "historic function" and select transportation, you will get nearly 500 records, many of which are bridges. At
this time, the database still seems to be a work in progres, though searching
under "bridge type" will also yield a few results. Some of the bridges have
pictures. Many of the pictures make you question why so many bridges were not
considered eligible for the NRHP.
You can also type "bridge" into the "historic name" field to retrieve even more records (over 1,300).
Meanwhile, a couple people wrote in with the news that the Illinois Department of Transportation has created a new website for bridge inspection reports.
The reports are similar to those from the National Bridge Inventory, but
with more details and updated more frequently. The website
is geared for searching for bridges on state highways, but non-state bridges
can be found with a little digging.
Completed in 1888, this massive steel cantilevered truss was the first bridge
built over the Hudson below Albany. It was a feat of engineering in its day.
Dwindling train traffic, plus a fire on May 8, 1974, closed the bridge
for good. Following an ugly series of legal battles and ownership changes,
the bridge has been rehabilitated as the "Walkway Over the Hudson" and will
become part of the New York State Park system.
If you want to save a bridge, sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands. A through truss footbridge in the middle of Seneca, Missouri, was falling apart,
but the owner, the Missouri Department of Transportation, wasn't interested in repairing
it. Instead, the community took charge of the project and convinced MoDOT to deed the bridge over to the town.
This week, the bridge was lifted off its foundations and sent to a local steel company for rehabilitation.
The bridge is a rarity, a not-quite-full-size through truss built specifically
for pedestrians. A twin bridge, on the opposite side of the street, was destroyed
by a flood in 1959 and replaced with a less interesting pony truss.
It's not clear when the bridge was built. One newspaper article
quotes a source who believes the bridge was built in 1886. If true, this would
be quite a find, but I'm skeptical.
The bridge features a riveted Warren through truss with "two-angle" steel members.
Historically, most truss bridges were built with back-to-back channels, joined with lacing
or plates to create a box beam. As the Missouri Historic Bridge Inventory explains,
however, the two-angle design was constructed with back-to-back angles, saving material
costs. It was used for Missouri highway bridges since at least 1908, but was most popular during the 1920s.
With its lightweight construction, two-angle steel was better suited at first
for less-demanding footbridges. The Jefferson Avenue Footbridge in Springfield, built by the American Bridge Co. in 1902,
features two-angle members along with the same lattice railing as the Seneca bridge. I have
a strange feeling that both bridges share the same early 1900s heritage (although Jefferson Avenue
is considerably larger and more elaborate).
Another bridge comes to mind, the bizarre 1885 Victorian Footbridge
in St. Louis, which includes a riveted upper chord that could be described
as two-angle iron. Or maybe I'm seeing things. (The Victorian Footbridge is so peculiar
that it deserves its own discussion, maybe some other time.)
The Missouri Historic Bridge Inventory was unable to find any highway bridges
with Warren through trusses and two-angle members; it seems Parker and Camelback trusses were the most popular
configurations for carrying traffic (here is a good example).
So even if the Seneca bridge doesn't date from 1886,
it is still a rare and historic gem. Soon it will be a shining example
of historic preservation at the grassroots level.
Here is one of the most incredible videos that I've seen on You Tube. The movie was made from stills of a camera that recorded part of the reconstruction of the bridge. This time lapse is amazing documentation of a massive bridge project.
Follow along as the old approach span (on the left) is disconnected from the main span and the new approach span (on the right) is attached. The project was designed to make minimal impact on the traffic demands of the Bay Area.
Submitted by Nathan Holth Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Preservation of Historic Iron and Steel Bridges and Other Metal Structures Workshop: March 2010 - Register Now!
Lansing Community College of Lansing, Michigan and Vern Mesler are inviting all interested individuals to register and attend all or part of a three day workshop entitled Preservation of Historic Iron and Steel Bridges and Other Metal Structures occurring in March 2010. Five $600 scholarships are also available for students to attend this workshop. These workshops would be of interest and value to historians/preservationists, as well as engineering students.
- Three Day Workshop Registration and application for the $600 scholarship available at the Lansing Community College Website: http://lcc.edu/tet/welding
Many historic metal artifacts and structures from the turn of the 20th Century, notably metal truss bridges, are aging and becoming deteriorated, producing a growing awareness among the public for a need to restore these important historic structures. These workshops will introduce engineers to the information and skills they need to design solutions and knowledgeably work with contractors to restore historic metals and historic metal truss bridges. For historians, they will introduce them to the both the problems and solutions that are needed to approach the preservation of historic metal structures, and present them with hands-on preservation experiences.
The 2009 version of the National Bridge Inventory was posted recently
to the FHWA website. I'm always reluctant to look at the new data because
it reveals the bridges that have been replaced by UCEBs in the last year.
As usual, I've converted the original files into a format suitable
for importing into Excel or OpenOffice. Here is the
download link (Warning: At 36 MB, this is a massive ZIP file).
I usually don't pay much attention to bridges outside of the U.S., as I have my hands full just keeping up with this country. However, the Flemish Association for Industrial Archaeology sent a note about the upcoming replacement of a very rare bridge in Belgium. The Scheepsdale Bridge in the town of Brugge features a Vierendeel truss with a swing span.
Belgian engineer Arthur Vierendeel (1852-1940) developed the unusual design, consisting of a truss with no diagonal members. To compensate for the lack of diagonals, the design incorporates rounded corners to handle bending forces. While several Vierendeel trusses remain in Belgium, the Scheepsdale Bridge is reportedly the last example with a movable span.
Submitted by Anthony Dillon Thursday, August 27, 2009
Most counties would be doing well right now to restore one historic bridge. But in Rush County, Indiana, they currently have two such projects underway.
Although the village of Moscow is now quiet, it won't be long until the sounds of rebuilding will be heard. Contractor Dan Collum and his Square and Level Construction Co. are currently busy cutting and notching timbers on his Parke County property. What will amount to several truckloads of beams will then be shipped to a field near the bridge site. Approximately 40% of the original timbers from the 330 foot long landmark were considered reusable. This after a June 2008 tornado devastated the small town, and it's iconic structure. After the new wood is finished, the tedious and painstaking task of assembly with old and new materials can begin. People around here are anticipating the completed bridge, but both Dan and Engineer Jim Barker say patience must prevail. The bridge will carry traffic once completed, so care must be taken to ensure a quality end product. Both men feel confident that the landmark will be ready in time for the 2010 Moscow Covered Bridge Festival in June.
A car was stuck on the new bascule bridge in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin as the bridge opened. The near-tragic event occurred last Thursday, August 13, 2009.
This photo, by Dustin Fritsch, is making the rounds
on the Internet this week.
No one is quite sure how it happened. Authorities say that there are five video cameras that show all angles of the bridge in the control house. It does not appear that the young woman, driving the car, went around any closed barricades.
Apparently, only the parking brake kept the car on the deck as the bridge opened to a 30º angle. When the bridge was lowered, the woman was able to restart the car and drove off the bridge. Reports say the operator spoke with her briefly, but she drove off and her identity is unknown.
Sturgeon Bay police are looking for the woman to interview her and determine what happened, to prevent this from every happening again.
There's been some confusion about the best way to submit photos and updates to this site. (See, for example, this discussion on MetaFilter.)
If you have photos for a bridge that's already listed, go to that bridge page and click "Post a comment here" in the Comments section at the bottom. You can attach photos to your post and they will appear right away.
If you have photos or info for a bridge that is not listed, go to the main Forums page and post a comment there.
If you have photos or info for many bridges (and plenty of time to kill!), then consider signing up for an editor's account. Once approved, you can upload photos and make changes directly on the site.
If you want to send me a comment, but don't want to share it with everyone else on the Forum, then use the Feedback form.
Other bridge resources,
including a fascinating report from 1939 describing bridges that urgently needed replacement, complete with black-and-white photos showing vintage cars and horse-drawn wagons driving across the dilapidated bridges
...two years ago today, August 1, 2007, the bridge carrying I-35W over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota collapsed at 6:05 PM, during the Twin Cities' rush hour. Because of repair work on the bridge, lane restrictions had traffic moving stop-and-go or crawling. Construction vehicles, parked on the bridge, would later figure into the failure investigation.
2004 satellite Photo of the I-35 bridge.
The I-35 bridge is on the far left,
the bridge to the right is the 10th Avenue Bridge.
(Public Domain photo by US Geological Survey.)
The central span collapsed first followed by the adjoining spans. Most of the truss structure and deck fell into the river and on to the river banks. The northern section fell onto rail yards and crushed several freight cars that were parked on the tracks.
An amazing set of images was captured by a Corps of Engineers security camera, located at the entrance of the parking area of the Lower St. Anthony Falls Lock & Dam, showing the collapse of the bridge.
A security camera captured these
sequential images of the collapse.
The image is public domain as a part
of the Corps of Engineers facility.
With all of the Federal stimulus money sloshing around, it's no surprise
that bridge replacement projects are quite common this summer. At first,
this would seem disastrous for historic bridges, but I've noticed
a curious trend: many of the bridges targeted for demolition
are not actually historic. It seems that UCEBs (Ugly Concrete Eyesore Bridges)
built during the 1960s and 1970s have not aged well, and are now
getting the bulldozer treatment.
According to reports, the 43 year old ferry at Cassville, Wisconsin will be replaced. $1.8 million of stimulus money is being allocated for the ferry's replacement. According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the current ferry makes 55 crossings in a typical 12 hour operational day. The paper also says everyone in Cassville is excited about the new ferry, the last operating ferry on the upper Mississippi River.
The ferry crosses between Cassville, Grant County, Wisconsin and Turkey River, Clayton County, Iowa, about 35 miles downriver from the US 18 Bridge in Prairie du Chien and 37 miles upriver from the Mississippi River Bridge near Dubuque, Iowa, the closest bridges crossing the river.
Eric DeLony wrote this op/ed piece
for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the state of historic bridge preservation
in Pennsylvania, as well as plugging this weekend's First Annual Historic Bridge Weekend in Pittsburgh.
The event features three days of exploring the city with arguably the best
collection of historic bridges in the U.S.
Not quite as dramatic, but I wrote this blog editorial
promoting the idea of using abandoned or doomed truss bridges for footbridges along city trails.
The June 24 edition of the Petit Jean Country Headlight (Perryville, Arkansas) reports that the historic Wallace Bridge, damaged when an overloaded truck broke through the deck last January, has been approved for repairs.
Perry County Judge Baylor House reports that he has released the go-ahead for repairs to structural engineers. He further says that he had hoped for grant assistance from the Arkansas Historical Preservation Program but such aid is not forthcoming at this time.
The bridge is located in Perry County, Arkansas and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Last January, the driver of a lumber truck that weighed 6 times the posted load limit attempted to cross the rare camelback through truss and promptly broke through the deck.
See the original story here and read the lively discussion that followed.
Sam Sawyer visited the Wallace Bridge on February 7, after the truck was removed, and took this dramatic photo of the damage. You can see this photo and his other photos of the damage in the original news story thread.
Imagine my surprise when I accidentally stumbled across
this page
on the MoDOT website with the scanned text of Missouri's long-rumored but rarely-seen
Historic Bridge Inventory. Posted as a series of PDF files, it's cumbersome to browse,
but includes quite a bit of research I haven't seen before.
As with any state's historic bridge inventory, these documents quickly become outdated
as bridges are replaced or destroyed. In addition, bridges that were previously
ignored have gained historic significance as time passes. Indeed, even MoDOT
describes the original 1991-96 inventory as being "in need of a profound update and overhaul."
They have posted an updated spreadsheet from July 2008 showing a depressing number of bridges
that have been replaced.
Since this inventory was derived from highway department records, it omits many abandoned
bridges as well as footbridges, railroad bridges, culverts, and private spans. Some of Missouri's
most interesting bridges fall into these categories, including the
Irondale Arch Bridge (1856, so far the oldest
bridge I've identified), Benton Park Bridge (1866 brick arch),
Victorian Footbridge (1885 oddball design),
Frumet Bridge (long abandoned Camelback truss),
and the Bois Brule Creek Bridge (which as one person recently commented,
is in better shape than its replacement).
Despite the limitations of Missouri's inventory, it's still a fantastic source of information. I'm in the process of incorporating
all of the new data as time permits.
...in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge opened, one of the most recognizable structures in the world. On this date, the bridge was open to pedestrians only, allowing residents an opportunity to closely inspect the bridge. (It opened to traffic the next day, May 28.) The Golden Gate Bridge was a marvel of technology and achievement when it opened, after only 5 years of construction. Dreamers had proposed bridging San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Strait as far back as the 1870s when the completed transcontinental railroad brought passengers to Oakland, but not to San Francisco, and the city found itself on the wrong side of the bay.
The challenges of spanning the Golden Gate Strait were many. The Golden Gate is a narrow strait that is the mouth of San Francisco Bay. It is over 350 feet deep and 390 billion gallons of salt water flow through the strait, four times every day, as the tides flow in and out of San Francisco Bay. In addition, high winds swirl through the strait on a nearly continuous basis. All talk was just that, talk, until 1916 when an engineer proposed a 3,000 foot span, estimated to cost $100 million to build.
Update May 6: The implosion of the Davis Avenue Bridge happened today.
Previous update from April 22: This might be a first: Pittsburgh officials have evacuated the residents of four houses near the Davis Avenue Bridge, fearing that the bridge could collapse at any time. The city intends to demolish the bridge as soon as possible.
Of course, it's absolutely appalling that the bridge has been allowed to deteriorate to this point. City leaders have been making excuses ever since the bridge was closed to traffic in 2001. The National Bridge Inventory indicates that the bridge's superstructure was rated as 1 out of 9 ("imminent failure") since at least 2005.
In other bad news, the main span of the Pomeroy-Mason Bridge between Ohio and West Virginia was imploded yesterday. This was another in a long line of cantilever trusses that have been replaced by cookie-cutter cable-stayed bridges.
I've never understood Pennsylvania's love-affair with Ugly Concrete Eyesore Bridges (UCEBs). They'll demolish a historic bridge on a road with very little traffic while spending megabucks to build a fancy replacement bridge that is overkill.
Is Pennsylvania starting to get a clue? I wouldn't hold my breath, but the situation isn't completely hopeless. A recent Parade Magazine article, How We Can Save Our Roads,
quotes Allen D. Biehler, the Pennsylvania state transportation secretary:
Biehler department now is rethinking its practice of replacing worn-out country bridges with large concrete decks -- which tend to be about 20 feet wider than the bridges. "You don't need an extra 18 or 20 feet," says Biehler. "What are you really getting for that additional spending? Multiplied by hundreds of bridges, that adds up to a lot of money.
Amen to that. There's no reason to build massive UCEBs on minor backroads.
If Pennsylvania is willing to consider building smaller bridges, then perhaps they'll start to question the whole idea of building replacement bridges in the first place. In many cases historic bridges can be rehabilitated to provide
more than adequate service for light traffic. Not every bridge needs to be built
with piers tall enough to withstand a 5,000-year flood and decks wide enough
to carry the Space Shuttle.
What happens when nobody can agree who owns a bridge? That's the situation at Higbee, Missouri, following the collapse of a wooden bridge across the KCS Railroad. A passing train carrying metal pipes reportedly caused the bridge to collapse after the load shifted. Nobody wants to take responsibility for reconstructing the bridge, so the wreckage has remained for the last year:
The railroad insists that the bridge is owned by the county since it carries Randolph County Road 2561, a convenient shortcut around Higbee. Somehow the railroad officials seem to think that the county is responsible for repairing damage that the railroad caused. Meanwhile, the county argues that the railroad owns the bridge and that the railroad is fully responsible for fixing it.
The February 18, 2009 edition of the Petit Jean Country Headlight reported that plans to restore the Wallace Bridge are underway. The paper says that Perry County Judge Baylor House issued an update on pending repairs to the historic structure, after a delivery truck broke through the deck last month. Judge House said that preservation specialists and two engineers (one of them is a structural engineer) are reviewing renderings and drawings of the bridge in preparation of creating a plan for the repair. Judge House indicated that repairs could be completed as early as July.
See Truck Falls Through Wallace Bridge for the original Bridge Hunter story and discussion.
The old bridge, a rare cantilevered through truss, will be replaced by some hideous UCEB (Ugly Concrete Eyesore Bridge). To add insult to injury, the project will likely obliterate the remaining artifacts of the Tuscumbia Swinging Bridge, one of the longest suspension bridges ever built in Missouri.
I gave a presentation on Sunday, Feb. 8, to the Bollinger County Historical Society about the truss bridges in the county. Here's a summary of the presentation.
Update Feb. 17: I'm giving another presentation this Monday, Feb. 23, at 6 PM to the Stoddard County Historical Society at the Stars & Stripes Museum in Bloomfield, Missouri.
Condensed from the Jan 28, 2009 issue of the Petit Jean Country Headlight Tuesday, February 3, 2009
A delivery truck owned by Haynes Home Center, Morrilton, made a wrong turn while making a delivery in Perry County early Thursday morning. The driver drove the delivery truck onto and into the historic Wallace Bridge that spans the Fourche LaFave River, five miles below the Nimrod Dam.
The truck was loaded with lumber for a job site on the Wallace Bridge Road, west of Aplin. The direct route to the job site, approximately two miles south of Highway 60, would have taken the driver across the Wallace Bridge. To avoid the bridge, directions were given routing the trucks south on Highway 155 then to a county road on the south side of the river.
Approaching the job site, which was directly in front of the truck, the driver made a right turn which took him onto the bridge.
Photo taken by Tonya English of the Petit Jean Country Headlight
The Federal Highway Administration has posted older data from
National Bridge Inventory going back to 1992. By comparing this version
with the current 2008 edition, it's possible to make a list of historic
bridges that have been replaced with UCEBs since 1992. I'll be incorporating these new findings into the website over time.
In the meantime, you can download
this huge ZIP file containing the '92 data in a pre-processed CSV format suitable for importing into Excel or your favorite spreadsheet program.
Leanna Elder has reported that the Fort Steuben Bridge has been closed and appears to be doomed. In fact, the 1928 bridge has apparently reached the end of its useful life and plans are now in place for its demise. The Ohio DOT has an article about the removal of the Fort Steuben Bridge on its website.
You can see more about the bridge and its prospects on the Fort Steuben Bridge here at Bridge Hunter.
As bad as these disasters were, the real disasters were the deliberate
destruction of many other bridges, including the one-of-a-kind Liberty Memorial Bridge in North Dakota, the massive
Glasgow Bridge
in Missouri, and the double-decker Foxburg Bridge in Pennsylvania (just to name a few).
Pennsylvania appears to be the leader in replacing historic bridges with Ugly Concrete Eyesore Bridges (UCEBs), but no place was immune.
...in 1933, work began on construction of a monumental project, the Golden Gate Bridge. San Francisco had developed into a center of trade, commerce and society in the 19th Century but when the transcontinental railroad was completed, San Francisco found itself on the wrong side of San Francisco Bay. At that time, talk began about bridging the bay to the east, to Oakland and to the north, over the Golden Gate, to Marin County.
The Golden Gate is a narrow strait that is the mouth of San Francisco Bay. Construction of a bridge was complicated by the strait itself, not only because it is over 350 feet deep, but 390 billion gallons of salt water flow through the strait, four times every day, as the tides flow in and out of San Francisco Bay. In addition, high winds swirl through the strait on a nearly continuous basis.
All discussion about bridging the strait was just talk until 1916 when an engineer proposed a 3,000 foot span, it was estimated to cost $100 million to build. Serious disccussions followed, including finding a designer who could build it for a lot less money. Joseph Strauss, an engineer from Chicago, suggested he could build a 4,000 foot structure for $17 million and the project was on.
Between the time the design sequence began and the first dirt was moved, the bridge faced numerous popular and legal challenges, not the least of which was from the Southern Pacific Railroad that operated the ferries between San Francisco and Sausalito. By the time all the hurdles were jumped, the Great Depression has begun and funding was at risk. The Bank of America underwrote the project in order to stimulate the local economy.
In 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps improved Muir Woods in anticipation of visitors arriving from the bridge. (Attendence in the park tripled after the bridge opened.)
The Golden Gate Bridge opened on May 27, 1937, and in 1994, the American Society of Civil Engineers named it to their list of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.
Author's Note: This thumbnail sketch is not intended to be a definitive history of the project but simply a reminder of the monumental effort that went into building important pieces of our historical infrastructure. Far more definitive histories of this bridge are widely available.
On December 15, 1967, at approximately 4:50 PM, the Silver Bridge that crossed the Ohio River between Point Pleasant, West Virgina and Kanauga, Ohio, collapsed during rush hour. 46 people perished in the collapse. The 1928 bridge, which took its name from its aluminum paint, used an eyebar chain design that was new at the time of its construction. After the collapse, another eyebar chain design Ohio River crossing upriver was immediately closed for inspection.
Eyebar #330, closer to the Ohio side of the bridge, had developed a tiny stress crack, perhaps in manufacture. When the crack reached 0.1" in depth, it went critical and failed soon after. Because all components of the bridge were balanced together, the failure of one component caused all the others to fail. Witnesses reported that the bridge collapse took about one minute. (The stress crack failure was discovered in the failure analysis. At the time, an inspection technique that would have located the crack was not available, short of dismantling the bridge.) The mysteries of "The Mothman Prophesies" add to the mystique of the area, and to the bridge collapse.
At the time of its construction, the typical automobile was light and small, a typical Model T weighed 1,500 pounds but by 1967, family cars were twice the size and two to two and a half times the weight. Bumper-to-bumper traffic jams, unheard of in 1928, were common in 1967. The bridge was severely overloaded on a daily basis.
As a result of the Silver Bridge disaster, the NBIS, National Bridge Inspection Standard, was created. It mandates that all bridges in the United States, longer than 20 feet, must be inspected every two years.
A contemporary report on the collapse can be found on the Time Magazine Website as can numerous other reports on the Internet.
A duke618 video about the bridge and the collapse was placed on YouTube. Be advised, there are some rather graphic images of the debris but this is a video worth watching.
During your busy day, take a moment to remember the 46 souls who plunged to their deaths when the "Gateway to the South" collapsed, 41 years ago today.
By popular demand, I've posted the entire National Bridge Inventory
in tab-delimited format
suitable for importing into your favorite spreadsheet program. It's massive
(30 MB download, almost 300 MB uncompressed), but is much more convenient than
the crazy file format available from the Federal government.
Also, we reached a new milestone yesterday: the 30,000th photo was uploaded
to the site. It was a photo by Gene McCluney of the
Little Deep Fork Creek Bridge in Creek County, Oklahoma.
Burlington, Iowa, is looking to replace the Cascade Bridge, a rare Baltimore
deck truss built in 1896. This would be quite a significant loss.
The situation doesn't look good for New Franklin, Missouri, where city officials
voted to support the demolition of the viaduct on Highway 5. As I've argued
earlier, this expensive project will
leave the town with nothing to show for it except for a less safe grade crossing
with the Katy Trail.
The South Street Bridge in Philadelphia, a 1923 deck-girder bridge over
the Schuylkill River, has been closed to traffic this week in preparation for demolition and replacement.
Cole County, Missouri, once had a nice collection of through truss bridges.
Those days are rapidly coming to a close with the demolition this week
of the Walnut Acres Road Bridge, a 1913 pin-connected Parker.
The Harrods Creek Bridge near Louisville, Kentucky, has been
closed to traffic
because inspectors deemed the railing (concrete balustrades) to be unsafe.
I wonder what would happen if these inspectors were to visit some of the bridges
in Missouri and Arkansas that don't have guardrails at all?
Bridge issue back on the starting line
is the headline from last month about the Vida Shaw Bridge in Iberia Parish, Louisiana.
This through truss swing bridge is at the center of a bizarre historic preservation
battle. The one-lane bridge had been slated for removal and replacement but those
plans were dropped at the last minute. According to the article,
As part of the bridge replacement process, the state was required to determine if the
bridge had historical value before taking bids on the project. The state decided that the
bridge had no historic value, but was later "trumped" by the Keeper of the
National Register for Historic Preservation, which deemed it eligible for historic
preservation.
That's quite an unexpected victory. However, the bridge's future is still in doubt.
It was listed as one of Ten Most Endangered Historic Sites in Louisiana for 2007-08.
While there's significant local support for preserving the bridge, there's also significant
local support for building a modern replacement.
Before any decision is made,
officials should look at the example of the Lorrain Bridge in Calcasieu Parish,
another swing bridge that was at the center of an historic preservation battle.
That bridge was successfully rehabilitated to modern standards while providing a mild tourism
boost. Sometimes win-win situations are actually possible.
You know the old line on TV about the police detective who is only days
away from retirement when he gets shot? That's a lot like the situation
at the Rock Island Bridge over the Mississippi River near St. Paul, Minnesota.
The National Park Service had given tours of the bridge one day in October as part of an effort
to preserve a portion of it. The event was a success, with
John Weeks writing,
"An unexpectedly large number of people turned out for the tours, giving the Park Service
hope that there is a large amount of interest in saving at least part of this old bridge."
The future was starting to look bright. However, just a few weeks later on November 21, a 200-foot section of the east approach collapsed.
County officials now want to move quickly to demolish the entire bridge,
so it seems likely that little if any of the bridge will be saved.
The situation isn't completely hopeless; there is precedent for saving bridges
like this. St. Louis rehabilitated two Mississippi River bridges that were also in
terrible condition: the Eads Bridge and the McKinley Bridge.
Like the Rock Island span, these two former toll bridges had been allowed by their previous owners
to fall into absolute shambles, especially their east approaches. Drivers avoided
the rough pavement and the approach spans that looked like they could collapse
under the slightest breeze.
The situation is much different today. After undergoing extensive renovations,
both bridges now carry highway and pedestrian traffic (plus light rail on the Eads Bridge).
It's hard to imagine St. Louis without these bridges. Could St. Paul deliver a similar
historic preservation coup? I'm not holding my breath, but it's not completely out of the question.
I'm pleased to annouce that bridgehunter.com now has
photos of five thousand bridges. The 5,000th bridge,
submitted today by Eddie Douthitt, is the Underwood Bridge
in Whitfield County, Georgia. Thanks again to everybody who
has contributed photos and information over the last few years.
New York City has sparked controversy by officially renaming the Triborough Bridge as
the "Robert F. Kennedy Bridge." Despite a push to eliminate the old name from
all road signs (at great expense), it seems
likely that New Yorkers will continue to use the historic name. And why not?
Triborough, like all good bridge names, neatly summarizes the purpose of the structure.
Let's hope this doesn't become a trend. I'm surprised that New York hasn't already
tried to sell naming rights to its landmarks bridges. Can you imagine
the "Brooklyn Bridge Presented By AT&T" or the "Bank of America Queensboro Bridge
With Additional Funding Provided By General Motors"?
In a perfect world, bridges and other public works projects would be named
for the people who actually make them possible: the taxpayers. But no politician
would dare call something the "Taxpayers Memorial Bridge" or the "Bridge Funded
By Drivers Like You Paying Exorbitant Tolls."
I frequently field questions from people asking -- or arguing -- about the names
listed for bridges on this website. As a general rule, the most commonly used
name is preferred, regardless of whether that name is "official" or not.
Since this website is about history, I try to stick
with names that best reflect a bridge's history. Unless "Robert F. Kennedy Bridge"
becomes a standard by most New Yorkers, it will remain the Triborough here.
We have good news and bad news about the recovery efforts from the Iowa flooding in June.
Bad news: Charles City wants to build a replacement for their destroyed
suspension footbridge, but it probably won't look anything like
the historic bridge. The culprit is red tape. Since Federal dollars will
be used to reconstruct the bridge, it must meet modern construction standards,
including the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's not exactly clear why
a suspension bridge wouldn't meet ADA requirements, but evidently the city might
be stuck with some kind of cable-stayed design -- a landmark, yes, but not an historic landmark.
Good news: The remaining two spans of the damaged Sutliff Bridgepassed its first inspection.
Assuming that the bridge passes further inspections, the historic spans
will be allowed to remain in place, and hopefully some kind of solution
(including the possibility of an authentic reconstruction) will be found
to fill the missing span.
Salem, Oregon, is on the verge of joining other cities with successful projects to convert railroad bridges for pedestrian/bicycle use. This excellent newspaper article describes the project and compares it to other ventures across the country.
Here is a poignant excerpt from the story:
Ethan Seltzer, the director of Portland State University's Toulan School of
Urban Studies and Planning, said urban trails have been popular across the
nation. He was unaware of any that have failed to catch on, although neighbors
sometimes worry about trails bringing undesirables into their area.
"Contrary to the notion that these things create nuisances in the neighborhood,
the experience has proven that they are essentially icons of neighborhood
pride," Seltzer said. The increased activity and public scrutiny generated by
trails tends to discourage problems, such as crime and homeless camps, he said.
For the last several months, a group of beta-testers have been
taking advantage of new features that make it possible to
upload photos, add bridges, and edit
information directly on the site, with no more waiting around for yours truly.
Hopefully, most of the bugs have been ironed out, and now it's high time
that I start offering editor's accounts to everybody.
If you'd like to have an account, you can sign-up here.
Caution: It can be very addictive!
In other news, here are some of the other website improvements I've made in recent weeks:
Posted updated inspection data from the 2008 National Bridge Inventory
Reno, Nevada, will be replacing six downtown bridges, starting
with the Virginia Street Bridge, as part of a flood control effort.
Nevada doesn't have very many historic bridges -- or any bridges
for that matter -- so this is very bad news indeed.
The Bend Road Bridge in Franklin County, Missouri, could be replaced
in the coming years. This two-span Pennsylvania truss is one of the more interesting bridges in Missouri, but it has extremely unsafe approaches (so bad that even Model T's would have had difficulty using this bridge). Hopefully
this bridge can be bypassed but not demolished.
Attention folks in Minnesota: officials will be
giving guided tours of the abandoned "JAR Bridge" (or Rock Island Bridge)
across the Mississippi River between Inner Grove Heights and St. Paul Park.
This unique double-decker swing bridge, with the rail deck on top and the auto
deck below, faces demolition next year, but efforts are underway to try
to preserve some of the bridge.
Here's an interesting news item from England about plans
to replace a minor bridge in Essex with a "concrete monstrosity."
Notice the photo of the "Weak Bridge" road sign. Just imagine if Americans
were as frank in our signs, such as "Dangerous Bridge Ahead
That Hasn't Been Maintained In 20 Years Because We're Too Busy Building
Bridges To Nowhere In Alaska".
Todd Baslee sends word that
New Franklin, Missouri, will hold an open house at City Hall to discuss
the fate of the New Franklin Viaduct. The event
is scheduled for Thursday, October 16, from 4-7 PM.
Ken Franke reports that the Old Alton Road Bridge in Oregon County, Missouri,
was removed over the summer and sold for scrap.
Demolition of the Liberty Memorial Bridge at Bismarck, North Dakota, is underway
with one span removed and two to go. This was the world's only Turner-Warren truss,
designed by engineer C.A.P. Turner.
One of the recipients of this year's MacArthur Foundation fellowships
is a bridge hunter, of sorts.
The replacement for the bridge at Yankton, South Dakota (named the "Yankton Discovery Bridge")
will open October 11. The old Meridian Bridge, a double-decker truss with vertical lift span,
will be rehabbed as a pedestrian/bicycle crossing.
The Highway 5 overpass in New Franklin, Missouri, is unlike any other bridge in rural Missouri. A massive concrete Art Deco-ish viaduct, it rises above the town to cross a former railroad yard, now occupied solely by the Katy Trail.
MoDOT wants to remove the bridge entirely, at an estimated cost of $1.3 million, and put the highway on the ground, presumably crossing the Katy Trail at an at-grade crossing. In short, taxpayers will end up paying megabucks to accomplish nothing, while removing an historic landmark and decreasing safety for users of the Katy Trail. What a deal!
I would argue that MoDOT could better spend that $1.3 million as a down payment for a bypass of New Franklin, removing heavy traffic from the aging viaduct, while also eliminating the unsafe four-way stop and sharp turn on Highway 5 in the middle of town. Or, if a bypass isn't viable, then at least the highway could be routed along the ground next to the viaduct, while the bridge is preserved for foot traffic in conjunction with the Katy Trail.
A petition is circulating in New Franklin to save the viaduct. After witnessing the ongoing fiasco with another nearby Katy Trail landmark, the Boonville Railroad Bridge, maybe residents can nip this foolhardy plan in the bud.
There has been some interesting forum discussions
about the peculiar truss bridges in Doniphan County, Kansas. The
Cottonwood Creek Bridge
near Bendena looks like a standard Pratt through truss at first, but it has
a really short middle panel that makes it one-of-a-kind. The
Duncan Creek Bridge
is a Parker through truss, but with only 4 panels and a very short span
(86 feet) for its type. Finally, the
Branch Missouri River Bridge
resembles a Kingpost pony truss, but with subdivided panels closer to a Waddell "A" truss.
My guess is that these bridges were assembled from spare parts taken from
other bridges. The strange designs were probably the result of improvising
with available materials. A few more truss bridges are listed in the county, so perhaps
more surprises are in store.
Fundraising efforts are underway to help preserve the remaining two spans
of the Sutliff Bridge in Iowa.
The new I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis has opened to traffic. Despite
opening at 5 AM, it seems like half of the city showed up for the occasion.
The fate of Missouri's Boonville Railroad Bridge is
still in doubt.
What I can't figure out is why Union Pacific hasn't been able to find other bridge spans
to use instead of Boonville's. Why not do something with the abandoned railroad bridges
over the Kansas River in Kansas City?
Chairman of the Door County Board, Leo Zipperer, has asked Governor Jim Doyle to consider removing the historic Michigan Street Bridge in Sturgeon Bay. He wrote a letter to the governor, suggesting that the state has higher priorities than renovating the 70-year-old bridge. In an interview with WBAY television news (the ABC affiliate in Green Bay) Zipperer said he doesn't want to see the bridge totally removed, just the troublesome bascule span.
Sturgeon Bay Alderman Jim Michaud thinks it's ridiculous to tear down the bridge. In in the same report from WBAY Michaud said, "That's the busiest street and the busiest thoroughfare in Door County." While the new Oregon Street Bridge, due to open any day now, will relieve a great deal of traffic from the historical bridge, restoration will keep two extra traffic lanes open across the bay. "You can't spend it in a better place," Michaud said.
"To replace it, we now know takes $33 million. To repair it is a $14 million project, so it's money well spent," Michaud said.
My Opinion: No one has estimated what it would cost to remove the bridge. As Professor Kevin Patrick of Indiana University of Pennsylvania says, "Bridges are expensive to put up, expensive to maintain, and expensive to tear down." The cost of removing the bridge vs. the incremental cost of renovating the bridge should be considered.
Leo Zipperer stated that the money could be better spent due to the current economy. The effects of the economy are short term, while removal of the bridge is permanent. After it's gone, it will be missed and if two extra traffic lanes across the bay are needed, as Jim Michaud said, it will cost $33 million to replace the bridge. That's in 2008 dollars, who knows what it would cost to build a new bridge 10 years from now?
Keeping the truss spans but removing the bascule span is about as useful as making a pair of jean cut-offs by keeping the legs and throwing away the shorts.
I agree with Michaud, the renovation is money well spent to keep the extra traffic lanes open but that is just the added benefit of preserving a living piece of history, an icon of Sturgeon Bay, Door County and the State of Wisconsin.
Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded a song in 1970, called Big Yellow Taxi which includes these lines in the chorus:
Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got 'Till it's gone. They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.*
Concerned citizens in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin decided that the time to save a historic bridge is before it's gone. They formed a group called Citizens for our Bridge, Incorporated, an IRS 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization to do just that - save the Michigan Street Bridge from destruction. They have worked tirelessly with the City of Sturgeon Bay, Door County and the State of Wisconsin to save the bridge as not only a historical icon of Sturgeon Bay but a vital link to the economy of downtown Sturgeon Bay.
The group even holds an annual all-weekend fund raising event called the annual Steel Bridge Songfest.
Shawn Fairchild wrote an excellent paper about the group, the bridge and the efforts to save the through truss and last overhead-truss, Scherzer-type, double-leaf, rolling-lift bascule in the State of Wisconsin. He presented the paper at the Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial Acheology, held in Duluth, Minnesota on June 3, 2000.
In his paper, he quotes Richard Moe, President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who said, "Not every community has an Independence Hall, but every single community in America has treasures that make it unique, that make it a special place. Saving these treasures is not someone else's job!"
Mr. Fairchild's paper is an excellent guide for how you can go about saving a historical bridge in your area before you learn that "...they paved paradise and put up a parking lot."
Robert Scoggin at the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department
sent a copy of his office's latest publication, Atlas of Historic Bridges in Arkansas, which includes information on all of the bridges in Arkansas determined
eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. This includes several bridges that I haven't seen before. I've posted some of the new photos and information.
The winners of the Great Arkansas Bridge Sweepstakes
have been selected.
Two pony trusses in Craighead County were made available for adaptive reuse,
with the state picking up the cost of relocating them. After they are replaced
in 2010, the bridges will go to a girl scout camp and a city park in Jonesboro.
Ashtabula County, Ohio, is set to open what they call
the longest covered bridge in the United States (at 613 feet long), leaving
New Hampshire's Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge
in second place.
However, New Hampshire will still hold bragging rights to the longest historic covered
bridge in America, while Ohio's bridge looks more like a UCEB with a tin roof.
Could it be? An historic bridge in Pennsylvania that is going to be saved? I'll believe it when I see it!
Being tied up with other matters over here in Germany, I have not been able to comment much on the situation regarding the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis one year after its collapse on 1 August, 2007, although I have been keeping up to date on the situation and even collecting articles for my personal archive.
A tip o' the hat to David Yates, who pointed out on the Michigan Street Bridge page that the bridge was open when he was in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin but police were monitoring traffic at each end - which set us to trying to find out what's going on.
According to the Door County Advocate, the Michigan Street Bridge in Door County was closed on July 21, due to structural deterioration that was discovered in an inspection. According to authorities, people ignoring the 5 ton weight limit put too much strain on the structure, forcing the bridge to be temporarily closed to verify its safety.
When it reopened on July 23, law enforcement officers began to monitor traffic to strictly enforce the 5 ton limit. The Green Bay Press Gazette reported that a truck towing a trailer got past the officers, but the driver received a citation at the other end of the bridge - an expensive toll for ignoring the weight limit.
The bridge is only open 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM when Police or Sheriff Department Officers will monitor traffic. It is barricaded between the hours of 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM.
The historic bridge was supposed to be replaced by the new bridge that is under construction, but a popular campaign to save the old bridge succeeded. After the new bridge opens, any day now, the Michigan Street Bridge is scheduled to undergo rebuilding.The Wisconsin DOT will keep the bridge open for now, but an estimated $13 million restoration is due to begin next March. The bid process is still open, in case you'd like to get in on the action.
Now that we've reached the one year anniversary of the Minneapolis bridge disaster, it's not hard to find politicians and newspaper columnists lamenting the sorry state of the country's infrastructure. They all say the same thing: We need to spend more money!
Unfortunately, almost everybody wants to spend money on the wrong thing: replacement instead of maintenance. Even if enough money could be found to replace all of the nation's structurally deficient bridges, it wouldn't take long before these shiny new bridges fell into disrepair again.
The new Missouri River bridge at Bismarck, North Dakota, is
set to open this week.
This will replace the old Liberty Memorial Bridge, the only remaining Warren-Turner truss bridge.
A wooden bridge on the Iowa, Chicago & Eastern Railroad near Reno, Minnesota,
collapsed and was involved in a 27-car derailment.
The New York Times reports
on the two bridges in Mississippi County, Arkansas, available for adaptive
reuse. It looks like the bridge offer has generated some interest.
Folks in Charles City are
asking for donations
to help restore their lost suspension bridge.
The Glasgow Bridge in Missouri is still slated for closure and demolition
starting August 4. Glasgow will hold a bridge "Tribute and Jamboree" on August 2
to say farewell to the bridge before its conversion into a UCEB.
An abandoned railroad line between Gordonville and Delta, Missouri,
will likely be sold for scrap. The line has a handful of historic bridges,
including a large through truss at Allenville. It's not clear what will
happen to the bridges. Maybe this could be a rails-to-trails project?
The Columbia Bridge in Monroe County, Missouri, was wiped out by flash flooding on Saturday. This was a riveted through truss over Elk Fork of the Salt River.
Meanwhile, the same river threatened the Union Covered Bridge, only one of four authentic covered bridges remaining in Missouri. However, according to Charles Havens, volunteers were able to save the bridge by taking off the wood siding, allowing water to flow over and through the bridge, but without pushing it into the river.
Recent rainfall over portions of northern Missouri has been intense, possibly even record-setting, so I wouldn't be surprised if other bridges were damaged by flash floods.
Yours truly is featured in this month's edition of Rural Missouri magazine.
The article talks about the first bridge I photographed seriously,
the Wappapello Bridge in Missouri. Sadly, this bridge was recently demolished to make way for -- you guessed it -- an Ugly Concrete Eyesore Bridge (UCEB). With this loss, and the recent closure of
the Dolles Mill Bridge and Lowndes Bridge,
only two pin-connected through truss bridges remain open to vehicular traffic in Southeast Missouri: Indian Ford Bridge and Wardell Bridge.
A bridge over Rock Creek in Dyer County, Tennessee,
will be replaced soon.
The article claims this is an 1870s bridge, but as a riveted Warren pony truss
it probably dates from the 1920s.
The Town Street Bridge in downtown Columbus, Ohio, was closed to traffic
this week after failing an inspection.
It was already scheduled for replacement next year.
When New Hampshire announced plans to replace the Seavey Creek
Bridge at Rye, they
offered the wooden bridge for adaptive reuse. One person
has submitted a proposal for relocating the bridge.
The wreckage of the Charles City Bridge in Iowa
has finally been removed from the river following its destruction
during the June floods. It's not clear what will happen next.
Mark Ellis reports that the Foxburg Bridge met its demise on July 24, 2008 when it was dropped into the Allegheny River. Mark posted his photos on the Foxburg Bridge page.
The demolition was also captured by The Derrick & News Herald that also reports a film crew was there from The Discovery Channel. Apparently the demolition will be part of a feature program sometime in the future.
The Wimer Covered Bridge in Jackson County, Oregon, has been fully restored after it collapsed in 2003. It will be dedicated this Sunday, July 6. While Oregon still has roughly 50 covered bridges, Wimer is the only one open to vehicular traffic.
It's amazing what can be done with modern GPS navigation systems.
I have been able to load the entire bridge database
on to my low-end Garmin Nuvi 200 (roughly $150 now). With the
data installed as "Custom Points of Interest" I can quickly pull up
the locations of all nearby bridges while on the road.
I've uploaded a ZIP file (2.4 MB, updated July 7, 2009) containing the necessary POI information for Garmin and possibly other GPS receivers. Inside is bridges.gpi, which can be loaded directly to recent Garmin models, and bridges.gpx, an XML
file that can be edited and converted for other receivers.
David Backlin sends word that the Powell Bridge in McDonald County, Missouri, will be preserved for pedestrian use after a replacement bridge is built on a new alignment. The county originally intended to tear it down, but will instead give the bridge to the Powell Historical Preservation Society. A fundraiser will be held July 4 to raise money for repairs and preservation costs.
The bridges that carry westbound I-94 over the Rock River and the Crawfish River, closed because threats from flood water, have reopened. AM620 WTMJ News reports that Wisconsin DOT has thoroughly inspected both bridges and determined them to be safe. The eastbound lanes will be restricted to one lane on June 27 to facilitate removal of the crossovers that were installed last week.
A railroad bridge leading to a Tyson's plant near Columbus Junction, Iowa, collapsed last night, injuring the engineer who had to be rescued from the water. This appears to have been a wooden trestle over a backwater channel.
Officials are worried about the integrity of the Park Road Bridge in Iowa City. This bridge -- and perhaps many others -- may have suffered from scouring by the strong current of the floodwaters.
