The Town of Huntsville has some aging, single-lane bridges that Town staff are recommending be replaced by culverts and, where warranted, widened to two lanes.
Director of Operations and Protective Services, Steve Hernen, presented a report at the April 26 General Committee meeting outlining the estimated costs for the proposed bridge replacements in coming years, as well as a plan to develop a bridge reserve for future replacement and maintenance.
The Town of Huntsville owns and maintains 13 bridges, according to the staff report. Four are newer structures, like the Centre Street bridge, expected to last 100 years with proper maintenance, while the other nine are older, single-lane bridges built in the 1920s and 1930s and are showing their age.
Town staff reviewed options for those nine bridges and determined that five (Ceramic Mine Road, Domtar Road, Etwell Road and two on South Lancelot Road) could be replaced with culverts and increased to double lanes, one could be replaced with a culvert and maintained as a single lane (Fish Lake Road), two could be replaced with a modular or prefabricated bridge (Gall Trail and possibly Candy Town Lane), and one should receive only minor rehabilitation (Rowanwood Road) as the MTO has indicated it plans to close that intersection and reroute traffic.
“We are suggesting stop rehabilitating and start replacing with culverts,” said Hernen.
The staff report suggests that the culvert plan would cost $1,044,500 more than the current 10-year bridge expenditure, but that the town would realize overall cost savings of approximately $2,000,000 in the long term by not having to replace those bridges with more expensive structures.
Hernen also noted that shifting away from rehabilitation would create a surplus for this year because the work needed would be engineering planning. “It would leave us a surplus at the end of this year of $686,000 and we could put that into a bridge reserve moving forward so we could draw on it,” he said. “(In the future) I’m suggesting we put $400,000 into our bridge project and start to increase that by two per cent per year. If we maintain that, it will fund all the work that is required and over the course of 10 years would give us a little surplus for future work.” He added that excess funds from next year’s bridge budget – approximately $300,000 – could be diverted to roads projects instead.
“At the end of 10 years, not accounting for construction inflation, we could be sitting with a million dollars in a bridge reserve fund,” said Hernen. “This would put us in good condition with all of our structures and it gives us another 60 years of savings when we have to start replacing the bigger projects.
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Paul Waldron says
The one lane bridge on Domtar Road needs replacement not rehabilitation. The two bridges on South Lancelot are the same vintage.
Why would the town even consider rehabilitation of these bridges. Knowing the condition that they are in the cost would be greater than replacement with culverts. Domtar Road gets a far amount of transports using it and should be a proper 2 lane road.
Replacement with culverts is the best option and would last longer. The other benifit with the culvert option is the greater capacity, rainfall events have become more intense over the years.
When they replace the bridge maybe they could rebuild the road with a proper base and ditches so the town wouldn’t be out there putting cold patch everywhere.
Henk Rietveld says
Consider shopping locally @ Uponor for non metallic culverts. Great product. Easier than concrete box culverts.