Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, April 23, 1994                   TAG: 9404240005
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RADFORD                                LENGTH: Long

OFFICIALS SAY BRIDGE REPAIR COULD TAKE SEVERAL WEEKS

That's bad news for the thousands of people who depend upon the link between Pulaski County and Radford; the good news is that engineers caught the damage before the bridge collapsed. It remains open to pedestrians and bicyclists. No motorized vehicles, including mopeds, are allowed.

"To close a bridge is quite unusual. It takes something fairly severe structurally ... something that puts the public at imminent danger," said Richard Weyers, a Virginia Tech civil engineering professor and infrastructure expert.

Though engineers will know better on Monday, the repair of certain steel expansion joints in the 48-year-old truss bridge should take several weeks and cost less than $100,000, according to Dan Brugh, resident highway engineer.

"I do not think it's going to be as much as two months," Brugh said.

Virginia Department of Transportation officials announced Friday they were considering inviting contractors to bid on an emergency contract for the repairs. The exact timing of that process will be determined early next week, once engineers prepare plans and locate enough steel for the job.

At midday Friday, four engineers and a bridge inspector were beneath the 1,484-foot bridge with a bucket truck. The inspector, the only one actually walking up the steel beams, videotaped a key expansion joint of the steel superstructure. It was one of the problems that prompted the shutdown Thursday afternoon during a regular, six-month inspection.

That spot is directly above a gazebo covering Berkley Williams Drive in Radford's Bisset Park. That gazebo and another covering a footpath near the river bank were built about two years ago to protect cars and people from pieces of concrete that fall off the underside of the bridge deck due to a corrosion problem. That situation, caused by water and the salt used to melt ice during the winter, is unrelated to the rusting that forced the shutdown, Brugh said.

The problem discovered this week, in part by using a new ultrasonic measuring device, is twofold: First, the pin-and-hanger expansion joint is "frozen" with rust; second, that puts a stress on other parts of the structure. If that joint were to fail, the whole bridge would fail, because a truss design is interdependent, Brugh said.

The corroded joint means the bridge cannot move as it's designed to in order to adjust to temperature changes and in the load it bears.

The bridge is one that the Transportation Department has been inspecting more frequently than the normal every-other-year schedule. In November, Memorial Bridge was rated a 4 on a scale of 1 to 9 (9 being the best). After Thursday's inspection, it dropped to a 2. Its trusses were rated "critical," the lowest rating.

"This was one we thought was holding its own [in November]," said Nancey Dillon, the engineer in charge of bridges in Southwest Virginia.

But after inspecting the bridge, Dillon and other engineers took only two or three hours to analyze the data and decide it needed to be closed.

Money for the repairs will have to come out of maintenance funds, which also are used for road repairs and improvements, said Fred Altizer, district administrator for the Transportation Department's Salem office. That means repairing the bridge comes at the expense of improvements to Virginia 100 or U.S. 220, for example.

"It would be a significant improvement to have a fund where bridges didn't have to always compete with roads," he said, adding that he was speaking for himself, not the Transportation Department.

Even with the emergency closing, Memorial Bridge is not scheduled for replacement.

"We have 25 bridges [in Southwest Virginia] that probably have higher priority for replacement, from a numbers standpoint," Altizer said.

With repairs, the bridge should have several more years of service. "What we're looking at is some isolated spots," Brugh said. "We're not looking at the whole structure [being in] bad condition."

Because of its age and the estimated cost of a complete rehabilitation, it likely will be more cost effective to replace Memorial Bridge in the same spot rather than rebuild it.

Neither that project nor plans for another bridge across the New River from Radford are included in the Transportation Department's six-year road plan for the region, Brugh said.

Weyers, who heads the Center for Infrastructure Assessment and Management at Tech, recently completed a major study of steps to protect concrete highway bridges. His work is part of the effort to do something about the more than 220,000 bridges - about 40 percent of the total - in the federal highway aid system that are structurally deficient. Replacing those bridges would cost $50 billion.

It's a movement that started with a bridge collapse on the Ohio River that killed 46 people in 1967 and gained momentum with the failure of an Interstate 95 bridge in Connecticut in 1983, which cost three lives. The problem has also struck in Virginia. Four years ago, the state had to close and repair an Interstate 64 bridge near Richmond.

One key result has been regular, mandated bridge inspections.

For the latest information on the bridge closure, call InfoLine at 382-0200 and punch in ROAD (7623). Have a commuting story you'd like to share with us? Or a question for us to ask highway officials? Call InfoLine and punch in 3820.