OKTIBBEHA COUNTY — Oktibbeha County has finally completed an inventory of all its minor bridges and drainage infrastructure, allowing engineers to begin the daunting task of actually inspecting them to see whether residents have been driving cars and school buses over sections at risk of collapse.
County Engineer Clyde Pritchard delivered his completed map Monday to the Oktibbeha Board of Supervisors, a product of his firm spending months physically driving through the county’s roads and counting installations.
“These are structures not currently being looked at under (state law),” he said. “Smaller box (culverts), larger pikes, culverts that we’re literally riding over every day but nobody is inspecting until you get the call that it fell in.”
The county has been paying closer attention to the state of its bridges since November, when an initial survey of the largest bridges in response to road workers reports found at least six in need of emergency repairs. Pritchard, who has been contracted with the county for more than a decade, suggested then that many of these issues might have been missed since the bridges in question were too small for the state to mandate inspections.
In total Pritchard found 245 small structures in the county. That includes everything from open pipes to culverts to full bridges too small to meet the state’s regular inspection threshold, which is having multiple spans or length greater than 20 feet.
The supervisors voted unanimously to move the project forward to actual inspections of all these items, looking for issues like eroding headwalls, surface sinkholes or rusted metal. Pritchard estimated the cost per inspection at $200, though that could change slightly as the inspections actually begin.
A specific timeline to complete the work is impossible to nail down at this time, Pritchard said, adding he hopes to have results before summer ends.
Once each item has been inspected and graded, Pritchard and the supervisors hope to integrate them into the standard two-year inspection cycle even though that is not required by state law.
There’s also the question of repairing those in urgent need, which Pritchard suggested is “probably going to be more work … than (Road Manager Victor Collins) can get to right away.” Depending on the severity of repairs, that could mean contracting with private firms for bulk repairs or bidding out large jobs individually.
“If it’s a small concrete box culvert about to fall in that’s one deal, but if it’s a 30-inch pipe that’s rusted out that’s different,” Pritchard said.
This is a very similar process and outcome to Collins’ efforts to inventory, grade and repair the county’s roads. Preliminary results in March found many roads in need of full tear-downs.
District 2 Supervisor Orlando Trainer told The Dispatch after the meeting that these are all components of a broader push by the board to get ahead of maintenance work and establish regular inspections of all its infrastructure.
“Right now we’re only playing defense,” he said. “We put stuff in and then we wait until it fails to come back and address it. … It keeps us in a frenzy, going from here to there and everywhere. This (inspection) includes all structures. We’ve got pipes out there for 30 or 40 years that need to be replaced before they collapse one day all of a sudden when someone comes down the road with a heavy load. … It’s a little ambitious. But you eat an elephant one bite at a time.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 35 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
