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HARTINGTON – A Randolph area asphalt overlay project is scheduled to start on June 6.
Work is expected to take about a week on 559th Avenue from Highway 20 going north for .75 of a mile past the Randolph cemeteries and include milling some of the existing asphalt and laying a three-inch overlay.
This asphalt overlay project is one of four in Cedar County that Knife River of Sioux City, Iowa, will be working on this year, but the other three are not scheduled to start until later in 2023.
Cedar and Knox counties are bundling two bridge replacement projects together.
Carla Schmidt, Cedar County’s highway superintendent, and Cedar County Board Chairman Dave McGregor traveled to Center for the Knox County board meeting May 25 where the supervisors chose a contractor for the joined project.
The Knox County supervisors awarded their bridge replacement project to Herbst Construction Inc. of rural Le Mars, Iowa, which submitted the lowest of the three bids of more than $1.3 million.
Cedar County’s bridge replacement project will be on the agenda for the commissioners’ June 13 meeting, with the commissioners expected to approve Herbst Construction – which submitted the lowest bid at just over $1.1 million.
The two bridge replacement projects have been bundled together through the Nebraska Department of Transportation’s County Bridge Match Program because the new crossings will be similar structures.
“With the Bridge Match Program, we will get reimbursed $250,000 of that ($1.1 million),” Schmidt said in a follow-up interview.
She said it’s beneficial for counties to bundle these kinds of projects together.
“The premise is, you should get a better price because the contractor’s getting two bridges in the process, so that they would hopefully bid a little cheaper,” Schmidt said.
The Cedar County project will replace the current bridge that crosses over the Bow Creek on 883rd Road about 1.25 miles east of Hartington.
She described the current crossing – a 100-foot-long pony truss bridge built in 1973 out of concrete and steel – as “structurally deficient.”
“It’s outdated,” Schmidt said. “It’s load-rated. Right now, it’s got a 13ton weight limit on it.”
She said pony truss bridges such as the one that is going to be replaced are typically older structures.
“It’s difficult to get equipment and stuff down them because they’re not as wide,” Schmidt said, comparing them to more modern bridges.
“This has got that big truss that goes way up and arches over,” she said. “You can’t even lift equipment high enough to get it over it.”
The new crossing will be a 130by-28 concrete-slab bridge with no weight limit.
The projected time period for work on this bridge replacement project has been set for January-May 2024.
“Weather always plays a factor in that,” Schmidt said of how the work schedule could be affected.
The crossing that will be replaced in Knox County is a steel truss bridge on 513th Avenue that spans the Ponca Creek just south of Highway 12, about three miles west of Verdel.
“It’s structurally deficient and functionally deficient,” Knox County Highway Superintendent Kevin Barta said in a follow-up interview. “It’s too narrow and it doesn’t have a good enough weight limit.”
He also described the current crossing as a “fracture critical bridge.”
“With a multiple-beam bridge, you have seven or eight beams,” Barta said. “One of those beams may fail, but the bridge won’t collapse. But this is an old-style bridge where you have the two big steel trusses – one on each side – and if one of them fails, then the bridge will fail,” he said.
The current 101-foot-long crossing – known as the Shaw Bridge built in 1976 – with a 12-ton weight limit will be replaced by a 150-footlong concrete-slab structure that will not have a weight limit on it.
“It’ll be an all-concrete structure – steel piling, but an all-concrete deck and guardrail,” Barta said.
Work on the project is scheduled to take place between December 2023 and May 2024.
