Bettina Puckett, Shelbyville News Staff Writer
The shocking interstate bridge collapse in Minneapolis Wednesday has led people around the country - and in Shelby County - to wonder how safe their bridges are.
A spokesman with the Indiana Department of Transportation described the Minnesota catastrophe as "bone chilling."
"That would be our worst nightmare at INDOT," said Will Wingfield, who works at the agency's Greenfield District. "We wake up every morning with the motivation to prevent that from happening."
Shelby County has 188 bridges that fall under the jurisdiction of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners and Shelby County Highway Superintendent Kem Anderson.
"A bridge is anything that is 20 feet or longer," said North District Commissioner Dave Mohr. "If something is 19 feet and 6 inches long, it's a culvert."
All of the bridges in Shelby County - and in Indiana - are required to be inspected every two years, which is a federal requirement, Wingfield said.
"For the most part, our bridges are safe," said Tony Newton, president of the commissioners. "But we have some that need to be replaced."
"There are 39 bridges recommended for replacement in the next nine years, along with six structures recommended for rehabilitation, 91 structures that should undergo some form of repair efforts in order to significantly enhance their structural life and/or safety and one structure that should be removed," said Shelby County's Bridge Inspection Report. The bridge recommended for removal is Bridge No. 13 in Moral Township.
Most of the recommended repair work ranges from new bridge railing or guardrails to riprap replacement, said the report which was compiled by USI Consultants Inc., an Indianapolis-based company that serves as Shelby County's engineer.
"All of these bridges will likely take longer than 10 years to replace and/or repair because of limited funds available to the county," the report said. "A variety of federal aid programs are available to the county in the form of matching funds to maximize the effect of the local funds."
"For the most part, I don't think we have that much to worry about," Mohr said. "But you never know because there's a lot of (a bridge) that you can't see. There's no guarantee that one won't fall in tomorrow."
Repairing and replacing older bridges that are more than 50 years old is a constant struggle for the commissioners, Mohr said. They have to keep public safety and taxpayer dollars in mind, but also balance that with historical and environmental concerns.
"It's just a big fight from start to finish," Mohr said. "It gets to the point where you want to throw up your hands and walk away."
Bridge 13
One bridge that commissioners have battled over for years is Bridge 13, a one-lane metal truss bridge that was built in 1889. For the first 75 years of the bridge's life, it handled only horse-and-buggy traffic and perhaps some Model A or Model T cars, Mohr said.
But these days, the bridge has to hold up 72-passenger school buses, tri-axel dump trucks and large fire trucks. Back in April, neighbors collected more than 400 signatures asking the commissioners to preserve the historic span.
The Bridge 13 dilemma still has not been resolved, but commissioners could wind up restricting the bridge to foot traffic only and building a second bridge nearby.
Shelby County has 11 one-lane bridges, the report said.
According to the bridge report, no bridges in Shelby County are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But six bridges are eligible for inclusion, and 12 are "possibly eligible."
Inspections can be tricky. Mohr said five require underwater inspections. "Someone has to physically go down and check those out," he said.
Commissioners also have to sometimes deal with environmental-related concerns, Mohr said.
Bridge 41
County officials spent seven years - and at least $80,000 in taxpayer money - trying to decide what to do with Bridge No. 41 near Boggstown. To historians, it's a 1910 Camelback truss bridge worth preserving, but to commissioners, it's a narrow one-lane bridge located at the hazardous intersection of County Roads 825 West and 275 North.
In 2001, a small endangered creature called the snuffbox mussel was discovered nearby. "They found one, but they didn't know if it was dead or alive," Mohr said. Fortunately, a team that came in looking for more mussels did not find any, he said.
Officials finally decided in February 2005 to rehabilitate Bridge No. 41, which had been found to be structurally deficient. Wide vehicles, such as farm equipment, must make a four-mile detour around it.
Because USI recently took over the bridge program from another company, bridge inspections have fallen behind.
According to the report, 187 bridges out of the 188 in Shelby County's inventory have not been inspected within 26 months of their prior inspection dates. Newton said that is due to the county changing companies, but he does not believe the lapse is a cause for concern.
"It had been three or four years (since an inspection), that would be bad," he said.
In the future, commissioners will have to make hard decisions on what to do with the county's older bridges that might no longer be suitable for modern traffic.
"If we've got to keep (the historic bridges), there needs to be a mechanism to help fund them," Mohr said.