KTIBBEHA COUNTY — Polly Bell Road’s bridge is closed until Thursday for critical repairs, just one of many bridges around Oktibbeha County found to be in unsafe condition.
During the Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors meeting Monday, Road Manager Victor Collins also asked to conduct bridge repairs on Harpole Road, Bethel Road, South Ridge Road, Old West Point Road and Wade Road.
Polly Bell Road’s bridge had issues with erosion, as a retaining wall beneath it has been losing the dirt that supports it. The surface of the road has also faced issues with wear and tear from use, Board President Marvell Howard said during the meeting. On Wednesday, Howard told The Dispatch that most of the other bridges face similar issues.
“Polly Bell Road is the third bridge found in a very unsafe condition by road crews just in District 3,” Howard said during the meeting. “There’s a hole on top, and underneath, the headwall is completely gone. It’s just a matter of time before all the material caves and somebody takes a nosedive.”
Most of the bridges can be repaired in-house with county staff and materials in storage, Howard said, with the contracted engineer for the county Clyde Pritchard signing off on the final product to ensure it’s structurally sound.
County crews will use three-inch treated wooden boards already on hand for the bulk of the work, Collins said, which should last about 20 years. What the county doesn’t have on hand will need to be ordered using the county’s road and bridge fund, Howard said.
Bridges will close one at a time as crews get to them. Work on Polly Bell Road should wrap up on Thursday, Collins said, with repairs Harpole Road slated to follow. Those repairs will take about a week, he said.
“It’s a deeper creek, and it’s going to take more boards to do it,” Collins said. “We need to do more digging out to make it safe for the guys going down in there. … It’ll be at least six to eight weeks for all of (the bridges).”
The bridge over Sun Creek, however, has damage to its pylons, which county crews don’t have the means to replace, Howard told The Dispatch Wednesday. The board will write a request for proposals for the work at Sun Creek during its next meeting on Dec. 2, he said.
While crews repair those six bridges, workers are also taking an inventory of other bridges in the county and checking if any more need maintenance.
Questions about inspection
During Monday’s meeting, Collins’ request sparked concern among supervisors about how the bridges degraded if Pritchard was surveying them every two years.
“My question is why county workers are finding these instead of the county engineer,” Howard said. “… There is no way this bridge got this way in two years.”
County engineers are required to survey any bridges with multiple spans or a length over 20 feet every two years, Lowndes County Engineer Zach Foster told The Dispatch on Wednesday, though he did not specifically comment on Oktibbeha’s bridges, since they are out of his purview. If any structural damage is discovered, that inspection becomes annual until the issue is fixed, he said.
Oktibbeha County has been contracting with Pritchard and his firm, Pritchard Engineering, to manage all engineering projects throughout the county for more than a decade.
Pritchard suggested at the Monday meeting that some bridge damage might not have been noted in standard surveys because the state only rates damage to beams, columns, slabs and other structural elements. Other components like the headwall underneath or connections with the road might not be counted.
Those surveys also only cover bridges of sufficient size, and many of the ones in need of repair are only a single span, Pritchard said. But Howard told The Dispatch Wednesday that Polly Bell Road’s is around 30 feet, which is long enough to require inspections.
Pritchard admitted during the meeting that, “(the bridge damage) should’ve been reported. … I do see your point.” Howard and Collins said they’d gotten word of the damage to these particular bridges through reports from residents and road crews.
Pritchard did not respond to a request for further comment from The Dispatch. He told the supervisors Monday that he’d look to see whether Polly Bell Road and the other bridges had records showing they’d been inspected recently.
“Bridges are critical to our everyday travel,” Howard told The Dispatch Tuesday. “We’ve got to make sure they’re safe for the citizens traveling over them. We’ve got school buses loaded with kids (using them) every day. We’ve got to make sure we maintain up-to-date inspection of these bridges. … That responsibility lies with our engineer, to have procedures in place to properly inspect our bridges.”
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