April 19, 2024

Sycamore Street bridge project still on target for fall finish

By DUSTY DAVIS

Work continues on the replacement of the Sycamore Street bridge in Creston. Although an exact date has not been determined, plans are to have the bridge ready this fall. (John Van Nostrand)

Work on replacing the Sycamore Street bridge began last fall and is expected to take 12 months to complete. City administrator Mike Taylor said the project began after an annual bridge inspection done by Des Moines-based engineering firm Calhoun-Burns & Associates.

“The state of Iowa requires you to have bridge inspections on a regular basis,” Taylor said. “We contract that out with Calhoun-Burns. We’ve been watching that bridge for several years.”

Inspections are required in order to give cities time to take action before a bridge becomes too unsafe.

“They put a life on the bridge when they’re new and when they evaluate them each year, they determine what the expected life of that is,” Taylor said. “There could be cracks, there could be other structural issues, the age of it, there could be lots of reasons.”

The bridge on Sycamore Street was nearing the end of its life, prompting swift action.

“This one finally got to a point where there was five years life left in the bridge and we finally made it to a place on the list to the state of Iowa where we could get federal funding for bridges, since we qualified, we met the criteria, we applied, we got about a million bucks worth of federal funding to replace the bridge,” Taylor said.

Although $1 million was awarded, Taylor said the project itself may not require all of it, but the leftovers can be used to cover unforeseen issues.

“It may or may not cost that much, I think the bid came in a little bit less than that but as you get into construction projects, things are found that you weren’t aware of, or the engineering group wasn’t aware of, so there may be some adjustments with that,” he said. “With this project, there was some other work done around that area, there had to be some relocation of some sewer lines and water lines and that all plays into the cost as well.”

Despite there being a project underway, Taylor said the bridge was never hazardous.

“It was not an unsafe bridge, it had a certain amount of what they felt was safe life of it left and we were able to plan for it and get on the schedule and get it replaced before it became an issue,” he said. “It was never closed or restricted or anything like that so it was never unsafe.”

Taylor said construction began in the fall 2020 and is expected to be completed by this fall.