ACCIDENTS COMMON ON RIVER BRIDGE

A "Bridge closed" sign is expected to go up on the bridge that carries traffic across the Mississippi River at Cape Girardeau on Jan. 1, 2002.

That's the day Missouri and Illinois officials hope to open the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge to traffic between the two states.

Between now and then, almost 8 million vehicles will cross the narrow, two-lane, "functionally obsolete," structure. The bridge here is one of the busiest two-lane bridges over a major waterway in Missouri.

The bridge also will undergo at least one more inspection before giving way to the new cable-stayed, four-lane superstructure now under construction.

The Mississippi River bridge, which has been declared "functionally obsolete" by highway engineers because of its narrow lanes, underwent a walk-through inspection by Missouri and Illinois bridge maintenance engineers last year. It is scheduled for another inspection tour in 1999.

Engineers looked at expansion joints, checked rust spots and examined the steel superstructure and bridge floor during the 1997 inspection. The only damage discovered was limited to small rust holes in noncritical areas of the superstructure.

The federal government requires states to visually inspect bridges every two years for signs of failure. In addition to the two-year inspection, Missouri does walk-through inspections of bridges each year.

The bridge has withstood traffic and pier-bumps by barges for almost 70 years.

Construction on the bridge started in February 1927 and was opened to traffic in September 1928.

Millions of cars have crossed the bridge since the $1.6 million structure opened to traffic.

Just before the toll was eliminated at the bridge nearly 41 years ago, an average of 2,320 vehicles crossed the bridge daily.

Traffic quickly increased on the free bridge.

Today, an average of 6,198 vehicles a day cross the bridge.

"Some days there are more, some days there are less," said Steve Hoernig, a traffic studies engineer for the Missouri Department of Transportation. "But the average for 1997 was 6,198 vehicles a day."

Hoernig, who works out of the MoDOT office at Sikeston, said more than 2.2 million vehicles cross the bridge each year.

Some 24 accidents a year are reported.

A special report compiled jointly by Missouri and Illinois transportation officials counted the number of accidents on the bridge from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. According to the report, there were 224 reported accidents. That number averaged to a rate of 22.4 a year.

But, the report doesn't reflect minor accidents, especially those in which rear-view mirrors are hit. Clipped mirrors are seldom reported.

Large trucks are always trading side mirrors on the bridge. And, a lot of close calls on the bridge are reported by drivers.

The bridge is narrow, drivers of big trucks say. But the reason is likely that it was constructed before the tractor-trailer trucks were so wide.

Although the number of accidents were almost equal for both Missouri and Illinois, more deaths were reported on the Missouri side of the bridge.

The report said 113 accidents were reported, with 51 injuries and three deaths, according to the MoDOT figures. The Illinois Department of Transportation reported 111 accidents in its decadelong study. There were 70 injuries and only one fatality.

Accident statistics were not immediately available for the past year. One fatality was reported recently when a Delta man was killed in a head-on collision.