$1.7 million County Road 201 bridge replacement is county's biggest project in 40 years

FREMONT – Sandusky County Engineer Carlos Baez Sr. has managed bridge construction projects all over the county, but the $1,732,223 replacement of the County Road 201 bridge across the Sandusky River is the biggest bridge project he has ever overseen.

His big smile comes when he explains the funding, 95% of which is from outside the county.

Detour signs and advanced warnings have been posted for weeks.

“It will be a composite deck. Before it was a non-composite. This will be very similar to what you see on state routes,” Baez said of the new bridge. “Being that it is only 40-years-old, the foundation is in really good shape. The piers are in really good shape."

In fact, almost every aspect of the bridge is very solid, he says.

"They are all sitting on solid rock, bedrock.”

Crews are going to reuse those parts and replace the deck.

The multi-span bridge was closed on July 1, when the Ballville Township section of CR 201 was shut down between County Road 132 (South River Road), and County Road 53 (Tiffin Road). Plans have it closed for 120 days, right around Halloween.

“What’s a little more interesting about this bridge, built in the 80s, is it’s multi-spanned. It has four spans. Really, the lifespan on these pre-stress box beams is 40 to 50 years,” Baez said. “We’re getting about 50 to 60 years out of them.”

Great Lakes Demolition Co. set up environmental containment barriers in the water, built a temporary road into the middle of the river and had the deck torn off in less than two weeks.

This is the first river bridge the county has replaced in 40 years. There are six river bridges, the county manages all of them. Five are over the Sandusky River and one crosses the Portage River. All of them are older than this one.

“The State Street bridge is almost 100 years old and the Tindall Bridge is over 100 years old,” Baez said.

The bridge is somewhat unusual. The east side is higher than the west side of the river.

“You have about a 2.5% incline. Five percent is when you start getting warnings,” Baez said. “That’s as much of a hill as you will really see around here, but that’s just the geography of the river.”

Not everything is being removed. The pre-stress box beams have worn out.

“It was a new bridge, built in 1983, so 41 years ago. It’s not very old at all,” Baez said. “A lot of engineers around the state use this design, with pre-stress box beams. We have well over 100 bridges with the same design.”

They will use box beams again, but this time with a concrete deck, tying it together into a single unit, making that composite design.

“It should last a lot longer,” Baez said. “I’ve designed this bridge to last at least 50 years.”

The bridge had more and heavier traffic than it was designed to handle.

“I think they underestimated the amount of truck traffic that was going to use the bridge," he said. "It was a dead-end road in the 1980s, but they built the bridge."

The bridge gets an average of 3,000 vehicles per day, with 25% of that traffic being fully loaded commercial trucks.

He attributes a lot of the truck traffic to vehicles coming from the north and going into Seneca County, primarily to Arm & Hammer. There are other businesses as well, moving fertilizer, oil and gas. Much of that traffic is loaded to the 80,000 pound limit.

Repairs were made 15 years ago, but after 40 years the inspections were showing significant wear. Truck weight limits were lowered and he started looking for money.

Some of those older repairs were exposed by the time the 2022 regular bridge inspection took place. Those 15-year-old repairs had covered up wear issues.

“That December we closed the bridge, changed the load limit, and posted it, to minimize the amount of truck traffic. It was just to give us a little more time to find the funding to replace the bridge,” Baez said.

He then had a race against time to find the money, get the bridge designed, and bid out, which he was able to do $100,000 under budget.

“There’s federal funding that comes to us from the County Engineers Association of Ohio. That money is available every year, but it’s usually seven or eight years out,” Baez said with a satisfied smile on his face. “Given the rating we had on the bridge, I was able to move it up to this year. It’s federal funding, but we have a program with the Ohio Department of Transportation and the CEAO where I can exchange federal funds for state funds. That just allows us to do the project under state regulations, verses federal regulations, and it basically saves everyone a bunch of money and time.”

What normally takes eight years, Baez cut down to two, with the state funding 95% of the cost.

“Now we are only paying 5% of the $1.8 million dollar project,” Baez said proudly.

This isn’t the only county engineer’s project. He has almost $8 million lined up, to be spent over as many years, some of which will go toward the smaller aging bridges, which cost between $250,000 and $400,000 each.

“This is a lot of fun. This is great. As an engineer, I live for this,” Baez said.

rlapointe@gannett.com

419-332-2674

This article originally appeared on Fremont News-Messenger: $1.7 million County Road 201 bridge replacement is county's biggest project in 40 years