OKLAHOMA CITY – A rural Jackson County bridge built the year before World War I broke out will be replaced soon.
The state Transportation Commission awarded a contract to replace a narrow bridge south of Altus that was built in 1913 and has a timber plank deck whose roadway is just 151⁄2 feet wide, Oklahoma Department of Transportation (ODOT) records reflect. The bridge is listed in ODOT’s database as a “one-lane bridge for two-way traffic.”
The bridge spans Bitter Creek on east/west County Road 167 a little over three miles west of US-283.
The load-bearing rating of the 106-year-old bridge has been lowered and the bridge is classified as structurally deficient. “It’s a fracture-critical bridge,” Jackson County Commissioner Kirk Butler said. “If any component fails, the whole bridge fails.” Such bridges are “a maintenance nightmare,” he said.
Nevertheless, the bridge is still traversed daily. “There are two or three families who live along that road,” Butler said.
The new bridge will be a single-span, pre-stressed concrete girder structure with a reinforced concrete deck, blueprints indicate. The new structure will be 95 feet long and will have a 30-foot-wide deck, ODOT engineers said.
Sewell Brothers of Oklahoma City was awarded a $707,827 contract on the bridge replacement project and was allocated four months to complete the job after construction starts. Butler estimates the work will start sometime in the spring.
“This has been a team effort” involving Jackson County, the Transportation Department, the Circuit Engineering District, “and several other people, too,” Butler said.
In fact, he said, getting the Bitter Creek bridge replaced has been “quite an ordeal” that started before he was elected to office in 2014.
The reason, at least in part, is because the bridge is considered historic. “I had to find somebody who’d take it and reuse it,” the commissioner said. Consequently, it’s destined for “an event venue” near Stillwater whose site includes a creek, he said.