Work will soon begin to repair two Oktibbeha County bridges that have been closed since late 2018.
Supervisors approved bids, totaling about $320,000, to repair bridges on Mt. Olive and Self Creek roads. County Engineer Clyde Pritchard said the bridges have been closed since about Thanksgiving when structural deficiencies were found during regular inspections.
“They have deteriorated piling and a broken substructure,” Pritchard said. “This work will install new steel piling and replace bridge components.”
The county accepted bids from Carthage-based N.L. Carson for both bridges. The Mt. Olive Road project will cost $170,886 and the Self Creek Road project will cost $149,997.
Pritchard said both contracts include backfill work to repair the road paving — work that’s typically fallen to Oktibbeha County after bridge repairs are completed.
“We don’t have anything being required from the county,” he said. “This is all for the contractors to do.”
District 1 Supervisor John Montgomery, whose district contains the Self Creek bridge, said the contracts include 90 days for the projects, which should be finished by March.
“I know both are an inconvenience, but we have to adhere to the law and the criteria said it was deficient enough that we had to close it down,” Montgomery said. “The weight limit had been reduced to the point that it was five tons on both bridges. We had to shut it down. It was a forced shutdown, and that’s fine — it was unsafe to cross.”
District 4 Supervisor Bricklee Miller, who shares jurisdiction of Mt. Olive Road with District 5 Supervisor Joe Williams, said the county will repair the roads in the Grand Oaks subdivision. The subdivision is near the closed portion of Mt. Olive Road, and Miller said motorists have used is as an alternate route while the road is closed.
“That’s not the designated route, but a lot of people are going through that subdivision and those roads were not meant for that,” she said.
Williams did not respond to calls for comment.
The county is funding the two bridge repairs with local funds. Supervisors, in late November, requested funding for 10 bridges from the Mississippi Department of Transportation’s Emergency Road and Bridge Repair program.
At that time, Pritchard said it would take more than $11 million to repair all of the county’s bridges.
The county is still waiting to find out how much, if any, funding it will get for its requested bridges, but Pritchard said there will be fierce competition.
The city of Starkville and Lowndes County have also each submitted three bridges for funding through the program.
“Statewide there were, I believe, 691 applications submitted,” Pritchard said. “There were $250 million available from the legislature. The total of those 691 applications is a little over $1 billion. So we’ve got a billion-dollar problem in the state of Mississippi and $250 million allocated to fix it.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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