MoDOT shores up old bridge for another year

Watching the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge rise above the waters of the Mississippi River has been a fascinating privilege for those who live in or travel through Cape Girardeau.

But the excitement about the planned opening of our new suspension bridge late next year has been tempered with concerns about the old Mississippi River bridge. And those concerns haven't been lessened by seeing inspection crews spray-painting question marks on certain beams or squinting at the rust.

However, the diligence and action of the Missouri Department of Transportation offers good cause to maintain confidence that the old bridge will hold up until the new bridge opens.

A week ago, MoDOT district engineer Scott Meyer and his team had a choice to make. An inspection revealed the steel in the old bridge might be more fatigued than anticipated. There was a question of whether the 74-year-old bridge would see 75, a birthday expected almost to coincide with the new bridge's opening.

A large concern was the old bridge's ability to support a major concrete pour on Pier 4 of the Emerson bridge this month. The pier is on the Illinois side of the river, so heavy trucks from Cape Girardeau County companies will have to make a several hundred trips across the bridge to supply the concrete.

So Meyer and other engineers had to look at the numbers and decide whether it would be more cost-effective to shore up the old bridge for another year or transport the concrete some other way -- perhaps on barges -- for the pour.

There also was a question of whether the bridge could limp through another year if nighttime traffic were restricted to one lane at a time.

In the end, the right choice was made.

Based on a careful inspection and an engineering analysis, Meyer concluded the bridge could be shored up entirely by MoDOT workers for well under $100,000. In terms of building a $100 million bridge, that's a drop in the bucket -- and far less than other alternatives for delivering concrete for the new bridge. MoDOT employees have fabricated steel plates and attached them to the old bridge to give that structure added strength.

"I know the costs of restricting the bridge are very high, in the hundreds of thousands," Meyer explained last Friday. "That's just in the contractor delivering concrete. Plus, putting restrictions on bridge traffic would be a terrible inconvenience to truck companies in the area."

"Everything compounds on a project on this. Every day that they have a delay, it compounds to another day, another week. Every day you are out there, you are renting the barges, the tugs. It is a chunk of money."

He doesn't foresee any future restrictions on the old bridge.

This is good news for everyone who uses the old bridge regularly, and particularly good news for the crews building the new bridge.