ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, August 15, 1996 TAG: 9608150045
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
For years, people in Eagle Rock have watched the world recede from them. This week, word came that the world soon will be four miles farther away.
David Gehr, commissioner of the Commonwealth Transportation Board, said the 63-year-old bridge that connects Eagle Rock to U.S. 220 will come down in six months to a year. He sacrificed the bridge in the name of "the best interest of the Commonwealth."
"I know this will be difficult to hear," Gehr wrote in a letter to Dee Dee Bruce, an Eagle Rock resident who for six years has led the fight to save the bridge, "but based on all the information available and recommendations from [Virginia Department of Transportation] staff, I have decided to close and remove the Route 43Y bridge."
That leaves Eagle Rock residents, as well as fire trucks, ambulances and school buses, with a five-minute, four-mile detour on U.S. 43, a road frequently littered with sliding shale from a high bluff.
Once a booming town, thanks to a limeworks that opened here in the 1930s, Eagle Rock has been dying slowly since the plant closed in the 1950s. The flood of 1985 wiped out much of what little commerce remained.
With so little reason left for anyone to come to Eagle Rock, residents fear that closing the bridge would starve out the village once and for all.
Gehr wrote in his letter that the transportation board first considered the fate of the bridge in 1974, and determined it had about 20 years left in it.
"It appears to me that it was the intention of the [board] to remove the structure when its useful life was reached. I support that decision, and now
"I'm mad as hell," Bruce said. "But I knew that's what would happen."
What angers Bruce most is that, if the fate of the bridge had been decided 22 years ago, why didn't someone just say so?
Bruce, a member of the Eagle Rock Volunteer Fire Department and Rescue Squad, took up the fight to save the bridge after its weight limit was reduced to 10 tons. The detour on U.S. 43 added precious minutes to fire and rescue responses on the other side of the James River, which the bridge spans.
But each year, the transportation board declined to add the bridge to its six-year rehabilitation plan.
Last year, an engineering study determined it would cost about $3 million to replace a bridge that primarily served a village of about 300. It just didn't appear to be worth the cost, VDOT officials said. What's more, the bridge is considered a primary road, which means it competes for funding with every other primary road project in the 12-county Salem district.
Still, no one would say for certain whether the bridge would be closed, repaired or replaced.
"Why did they just keep feeding us bull?" Bruce asked.
Gehr wrote that he would ask VDOT Salem District Administrator Fred Altizer to work with local officials in dealing with the rock slides on U.S. 43 and to make a safer intersection of that road at 220. But Bruce's self-education in the ways of public transportation has made her skeptical of that promise, too.
"They haven't done anything about it in the past, and they aren't going to in the future," she said.
Bruce isn't giving up on the bridge, either. She is drafting a letter to Gov. George Allen along with a package of evidence of the importance of the bridge to Eagle Rock.
"I'm beating my dead horse, but I'm going to beat it some more," she said. "If you didn't care about your town and the people in it, you'd just go ahead and let them take the bridge."
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: File/July 1996. Dee Dee Bruce stands on the Eagle Rockby CNBbridge, which will close. Bruce hopes her letter to the governor may
yet save it. Graphic: Map. color.