The state and county turns their attention to one type of long-neglected infrastructure.
Rock County’s Director of Public Works Duane Jorgenson told the county’s highway committee on Tuesday that since last year, the state has been helping counties inventory and inspect thousands of short span structures — essentially rural road bridges that are less than 20 feet long.
In Rock County, there’s “somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 to 1,100 structures like this, and we have 19 of concern. So really, that’s a fairly small number,” Jorgenson said.
He says the age of many short span structures is not clear, but he estimates they were built between the 1930’s and 1950’s.
Photos of the underside of some of the critical structures show eroded concrete, exposed rebar and in some cases, steel I-beams that have almost completely rusted away.
The county is assessing what to do while it figures out a long-term solution.
Jorgenson says the main interim options include closing the roads completely, constructing a makeshift span to take the stress off the deteriorated structure or posting a weight limit and hoping motorists obey it.
All these stopgap options would likely affect travel and agricultural operations.
When asked what it might take to replace one of the critical short spans, Jorgenson said it depends.
Simpler spans could cost less than $100,000 to replace, but others that would also require work on pipes or other infrastructure could cost multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Costs that large would be very difficult for some townships to cover.
The state helped fund the inventory and inspection of the short span structures, but with the next state budget still under construction, Jorgenson says it’s not clear whether state funding will be available to replace these structures.
