Spokane7
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September 19, 2011 in City, Idaho
Getting There: Deficient bridge puts Valley in a fix
The Spokane Valley City Council is looking at potential fixes of the southbound bridge of Sullivan Road.
(Full-size photo)
The percentage of structurally deficient bridges in Spokane and Kootenai counties is below the national average, but one of those deficient bridges is causing headaches in Spokane Valley.
The southbound bridge of Sullivan Road over the Spokane River was posted with truck weight restrictions earlier this year.
Generally, the restrictions ban trucks with short wheel bases compared to their rated loads.
Now, the Spokane Valley City Council is being asked to approve a $358,000 temporary fix. The issue will be discussed Tuesday.
At the same time, the city is seeking funding to replace the aging southbound span.
That bridge is one of 24 countywide deemed deficient in a recent nationwide report from the Transportation For America organization.
Local transportation officials said the Spokane area is making progress on fixing or replacing the deficient spans.
Two of them – the Interstate 90 overpasses at Havana and Altamont streets – were repaired this summer with rebuilt bridge decks and approach slabs.
The state replaced the Highway 27 bridge over Pine Creek south of Spokane last year.
Nationally, Washington ranks sixth best in the number of structurally deficient bridges with 394 out of 7,744 bridges being considered deficient, according to the TFA report. That is 5.1 percent of the state’s bridges that are deficient.
Across the country, 11.5 percent of all bridges are deficient.
Idaho has 373 out of 4,130 bridges that are deficient, or 9 percent of the state’s total. In Kootenai County, 10 of its 136 bridges are deficient.
There are 277 bridges in Spokane County, of which 24 were judged to be deficient at the time the report’s statistics were gathered, or 8.7 percent.
Spokane County is about to open a new Appleway Bridge at Stateline after the old bridge was demolished.
Elsewhere, a new bridge was completed last year on Chattaroy Road over the Little Spokane River. Two new bridges are planned on Little Spokane Drive at Wandermere and on Seven Mile Road over Coulee Creek, said Neil Carroll, county bridge engineer.
A bridge is considered deficient when one of its main components falls to a rating of 4 or lower on a scale of zero to 9.
While bridges can remain in safe use while deficient, a more serious concern arises when an aging bridge must be posted with weight restrictions, Carroll said.
The Post Street Bridge in Spokane has had weight restrictions for several years.
Pend Oreille County has the highest percentage of deficient bridges in the state with nine of its 52 spans being deficient, or 17.3 percent, the TFA said.
The issue has come up on a national level this month following President Barack Obama’s proposal to stimulate the economy with spending on transportation projects, including bridges.
Sargent Engineers, Inc., of Olympia, gave Spokane Valley officials options for removing weight restrictions on the Sullivan Road Bridge, including shifting all traffic to the eastern span and reducing it to one lane in each direction.
City officials said one lane won’t handle Sullivan Road traffic.
The preferred option is to add reinforcing steel to the bridge girders. So far, no outside funding has been identified to pay for the fix, said senior engineer Steve Worley in his report to the council.
Closures
U.S. Highway 2 from Farwell Road to Mount Spokane Park Drive will be closed during nighttime hours tonight through Wednesday night.
The closures will be from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. each day to make room for finishing a project to lower the highway grade so it can pass beneath the new North Spokane Corridor. Traffic will be routed to Market Street in Mead.
The state is also planning lane restrictions on I-90 east of Snoqualmie Pass starting today, including the section from Cle Elum to Easton where traffic will be reduced to a single lane in each direction this week.
Also, blasting work will close the freeway at 7 p.m. for one hour tonight through Thursday along Keechelus Lake.
Other lane restrictions are expected through the construction zones there.
Reopenings
In Spokane, work on Mission Avenue from Hamilton to Greene streets should wrap up by Friday when the street is expected to reopen following reconstruction work.
Also, Wellesley Avenue from Milton to Ash streets should reopen on Wednesday. Wellesley from Milton to Belt Street is already open.
DUI campaign
The Drive Hammered, Get Nailed campaign from Aug. 19 through Sept. 5 yielded 134 arrests for driving under the influence in Spokane and Pend Oreille counties.
Statewide, law officers nabbed 1,824 impaired drivers.
MLK Jr. Way opens Thursday 
bpackley on September 19 at 10:19 a.m.
Of course we have failing bridges here, especially in Kootenai and Pend Orelle counties! Both Governor Gregoire and Governor Otter don’t feel that there are any people living up here in Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho! So our counties don’t need any extra money to keep it’s bridges maintained! And of course we won’t get any more new federal cash because our respective governors won’t funnel any funds up here! Apparently, Spokane being the second largest city in Washington doesn’t mean anything to Olympia. Having almost 100,000 people in the Coeur d’Alene metro doesn’t mean anything to Boise either. We just pay our taxes, our hard earned cash goes to Olympia or Boise, and it doesn’t come back!! The proof is in our failing bridges and our extremely crowded highways and freeways!
Maybe it is time we listened to the growing chatter to create our own state so we can control our own hard earned tax dollars!
Just a thought… …
mdriftmeyer on September 19 at 1:23 p.m.
@bpackley: What a crock of on how you lump two different states together. Yes, Gregoire knows about the bridges and has authorized hundreds of millions for the N/S Project, an additional $37 million for the WSU Med School and much more.
This is a systemic issue at the Federal Level of keeping the 2% flush with cash and the 98% dealing with failing infrastructure.
The Sullivan Bridge has been structurally deficient for more than a decade.
The journalist should use their head and separate the two Counties.
They are in two different states.
Just because the overall region likes to lump these two together for marketing purposes, doesn’t mean they legally and economically have a common pool of resources.
The City of Spokane Valley is responsible for filing requests with the State. How about you find out what they’ve done before blaming the Governor. Discover what those State reps have done first.
westerly on September 19 at 1:47 p.m.
City of Spokane and county has 550,000 people and 510,000 registered cars. Seattle area 3.5 million people and a 1.7million registered cars. Pierce county, Tacoma, 790,000 registered cars, Snohomish county 737,000 registered cars.Go figure where the money goes..population centers.
RedCedar on September 19 at 5:04 p.m.
Once a bridge starts needing extra weight restrictions and land closures, it’s gone from merely being “old” to being a drain on the local economy. Businesses depend on trucks, and when they have to take the long way around or carry smaller loads, it increases everybody’s costs. If we want to spend public money on “economic stimulus”, replacing (or even just patching up) those old bridges that have gotten to the point of needing additional restrictions would be more likely to improve the economy than tearing out old wheelchair ramps made of plain concrete and replacing them with new ones containing slippery yellow plastic bumps. That seems to have been the only visible result of the first round of “stimulus”.
I’m not a civil engineer, so I would have appreciated a little more information on what constitutes the “rating” system of bridge elements. Does a “4” on a scale of “0-9” mean that that element now has only 40% of its initial strength? If so, given that bridges are generally designed with a 5:1 safety factor, that would mean that, for example, the rusty old beam that was stressed at 20% of its yield strength when new is now being stressed to 50% of its yield strength. Given that there’s lots of extra redundancy in bridge designs and some of the stress gets carried by elements that weren’t included in the stress calculations in the old days, these “deficient” bridges probably aren’t about to fall down.
Nevertheless, they’re not going to spontaneously heal themselves, and with increasing development and increasing traffic, they’re only going to keep getting pounded harder. I’m as stingy as anybody when it comes to spending tax money, and I don’t think every bridge replacement has to be a gold-plated showpiece with every imaginable bell and whistle attached (e.g. light rail, bike lanes, high-tech sensors, artwork, etc.) but if we really want our “economic stimulus” money to stand a chance of actually improving the overall economy rather than mere paying people to prop up shovels, then it makes a lot of sense to spend that money keeping freight and people moving as smoothly and cheaply as possible.
Thayne on September 19 at 5:12 p.m.
I just hope it doesn’t take them 3 years to fix this bridge like it did the one on Baker. It was closed forever and very frequently there was no construction people to be seen working on it.