Dover Bridge drops onto Popular Mechanics' list

U.S. 2 bridge becomes poster child for U.S. infrastructure woes

DOVER - What does the Dover Bridge have in common with the Brooklyn Bridge, Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle?

They're among “The 10 Pieces of U.S. Infrastructure We Must Fix Now,” according to a special report published by Popular Mechanics. The report is available on the magazine's Web site and will be published in its May issue.

“No one can predict what bridge, levee or water main will fail next. But some problems are widely known, and work is long overdue. Here are 10 great places to start,” Erik Sofge and PM editors wrote in an introduction to the report.

The Dover Bridge occupies the seventh spot on the list.

“Idaho's Dover Bridge sees about 5,000 vehicles per day, and we don't envy the drivers. The bridge scored an outrageously low ‘sufficiency rating' of 2 out of 100 in the National Bridge Inventory,” the entry reads.

Chicago's traffic-congestion breeding Circle Interchange tops the list, followed by the Brooklyn Bridge, the canal lock in New Orleans, Atlanta's water system, Seattle's viaduct and the Herbert Hoover Dike on Florida's Lake Okeechobee. Kentucky's Wolf Creek Dam, the river levees in Sacramento, Calif., and O'Hare International round out the top 10.

The steel truss bridge at Dover was built in 1937 and carries U.S. Highway 2 over railroad tracks utilized by the BNSF Railway and the Pend Oreille Valley Railroad. An Idaho Transportation Department inspection report from 2006 lists the bridge structure condition as “intolerable.” The deck condition is deemed “serious” and the substructure and superstructure are listed as “poor.”

A $25 million replacement bridge was designed and slated for construction in 2002, but a lack of funding kept the project from advancing. The project was dropped from ITD's Statewide Transportation Improvement Program in 2006 and moved into the department's “Horizons” program. The reclassification meant construction on the project was six to 10 years out.

The bridge closed briefly in January 2007 after a 30-by-30-inch chunk of concrete broke loose and was found dangling by its rebar. The state wrung about $600,000 out of the STIP to conduct emergency repairs last fall.

Officials at ITD maintain the bridge is safe, but don't dispute that it needs to be replaced. They're hoping the publicity will help loosen purse strings at the federal level.

“Calling attention to the necessity of replacing the Dover Bridge is not necessarily a bad thing,” said Barbara Babic, ITD's District 1 spokeswoman.

Babic said ITD's Deputy Director Scott Stokes recently returned from the nation's capitol on a hunt for alternative funding options, such as congressional earmarks.

“We have been looking very hard at non-traditional revenue sources,” Babic said.