The re-opening of the bridge over the Lower Little River on Caney Church Road outside of Lumberton will delayed by about a month, as Lamar County officials will need to re-submit a new work program to the proper state authorities.
During a recent meeting of the Lamar County Board of Supervisors, County Engineer Don Walker said that he did submit the program, but never received a response in return, putting a halt to progress on the bridge.
“We sent it last year, and they never sent it back because they were arguing back and forth about how they wanted to fund it and such,” he said. “So now, they want me to go ahead and re-submit the program.
“We’ve already done a preliminary design that we submitted to the load rating consultant for his review, but I can’t submit plans to State Aid without the program approved. And since we’ve got two new board members (Terry Bass and Mitch Brent), they want us to go ahead and get a new program.”
The bridge was closed in late November on orders from the Mississippi Office of State Aid Road Construction after county officials received information that it was not in compliance with recently-set standards.
According to a letter from State Aid Engineer Harry Lee James, the bridge piles cannot provide adequate structural capacity at two of the bridge’s bents – or girders across the top of the piers – because of a small pile cross-section paired with the unbraced length of approximately 20 feet.
“What it amounts to is that we have a concrete bridge with concrete piling, concrete superstructure, no timber associated with the bridge,” Walker told supervisors in November. “All of the pilings are 12-inch square pilings, which are narrow pilings – we don’t use 12-inch pilings anymore.
“Two bents that were generally in the area of the main channel have a total height of what we refer to as an unbraced link exceeding 20 feet, and that unbraced link is causing these problems for those slender piles. The load rating consultants are required to run their analysis using a specific software program dictated by the Federal Highway Administration, and that program came back and indicated that the bridge should not just be posted – the bridge should be immediately closed.”
Upon receiving that information, supervisors voted to declare an emergency situation to immediately shut down the concrete bridge, which connects Purvis To Columbia Road with Mississippi 13. The bridge is located just south of Ben Sones Road over the Lower Little River.
To get the bridge back in compliance, officials will need to reinforce each of the bridge’s 24 exposed 12-inch pilings.
“All indications are that the state’s going to help with that, and that we are going to get our plan approved – it’s just delayed it a little bit,” Lamar County Administrator Jody Waits said. “I think originally we had talked about (re-opening the bridge after) three months or so, but waiting on approval, that could take a few weeks.
“But hopefully we get that done soon, and we can get started when the weather clears.”
