Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Editorial: A troubled bridge over water
Absent an engineering miracle, Narrows will have to do without its bridge while a new one is built.
From the RoundTable blog
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The town of Narrows needs a new bridge, and it looks like it will get one. But now residents are pondering what they'll do while the bridge is being replaced. There are no good options.
Narrows is aptly named. The small Giles County town is squeezed into a sliver of relatively flat land nestled in the mountains and bisected by the New River. A 57-year-old, deteriorating bridge connects the halves of the town split by the New. That bridge is too far gone to be repaired, but 15 years of funding requests to the state to build a new one went unheeded.
Enter the federal stimulus package. The state approved $20 million for a new bridge. But, as Roanoke Times reporter Jeff Sturgeon wrote in a Tuesday news story, joy over that development was shortlived as it dawned on residents that construction of the new bridge almost inevitably will mean a lengthy absence of any bridge at all.
That six- to nine-month outage could do far more than inconvenience residents. It could have a profound economic impact on the town and its businesses. The bridge is the only good route to the southern half.
When the bridge is closed, alternate routes will require miles of detour over rugged, narrow mountain roads. One route is too narrow for trucks. The other is restricted by a tunnel beneath a railroad track -- that has clearance of only 9 feet. "If we lose that bridge, it totally isolates this side of Narrows," Assistant Town Manager Buddy Kast told Sturgeon.
But there's no feasible alternative to closing the bridge. The existing bridge might be too decrepit to risk a common technique of rebuilding one lane at at time. Building a temporary bridge would be too expensive, and building the new bridge with a slightly different footprint would require time-consuming environmental studies that could delay the project beyond the deadline for stimulus money.
Unless Virginia Department of Transportation engineers can pull off a miracle, the people of Narrows have little choice except to suffer through the construction and hope the economic damage is kept to a minimum. This is what happens when essential needs are allowed to go unmet for so long.
