Limestone Plaza bridge to be rehabilitated

VILLAGE OF FAYETTEVILLE – The bridge in Fayetteville’s Limestone Plaza that stretches across the creek below will be the focus of a rehabilitation project.

With an anticipated cost of $1.51 million and construction scheduled for 2025, the project is being progressed by the Onondaga County Department of Transportation in coordination with the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) and the Federal Highway Administration.

The existing structure’s steel girders and sidewalks on both sides will be maintained, approximately 125 feet of roadway on each side of the bridge will be reconstructed, and a new cast-in-place concrete deck will be constructed, thus restarting the deck’s clock with a renewed 75-year service life.

The bridge, which was built in 1975, is seeing deterioration to the current concrete deck that serves as the riding surface, including cracking and efflorescence throughout as well as deep spalling with exposed reinforcement at the west abutment according to the main project website, limestoneplazabridge.wordpress.com.

Julian Woloszyn, a civil engineer II with the county department of transportation, said spalling refers to the breakup of the surface of concrete, while efflorescence is the powdery coating formed by a deposit of salts.

“The bridge itself is kind of at the tipping point of not really being worthwhile to do bandaid maintenance to,” said Zach Dale, senior project engineer with the firm Barton & Loguidice, which is the project’s design consultant. “It’s more cost-effective to get into more of a major project instead of smaller fixes at this point.”

Dale said total failure would be a long ways off for the Limestone Plaza bridge and that there are presently no safety concerns for drivers traveling over the bridge or anyone else in the vicinity.

Woloszyn said that beyond the fact that the improvements will make the bridge more secure going forward, the bridge will look nicer aesthetically after the rusting of the steel beams, other structural deficiencies, and hydraulic vulnerabilities are addressed.

“If deterioration is not addressed in a timely manner, then problems could begin to arise in the future, so this is to stave that all off,” said Woloszyn, who added that the bridge is inspected by NYSDOT on a regular basis, with preventative maintenance to certain spots occurring over time.

The crossing’s long-term integrity will also be restored with the replacement of its superstructure bearings, repairs to the wingwalls, and the installation of new steel piling scour protection at the edge of the footing of the abutments, which connect the bridge to the rest of the roadway.

That protective layer prevents the sediment-removing scour effect from advancing to the porous concrete and keeps the moisture from rusting the steel, which would make it expand and then push on the concrete, as a result making the concrete eventually crack and crumble.

“During high-water events, the force of that flow is considerable, and the constant churning action will erode the material that the bridge abutment’s sitting on, so these sheets will help minimize that,” Woloszyn said. “There are currently some steel sheets there, but they’re quite corroded… these new sheets will go right in front of the existing ones.”

The bridge will also have a wider shoulder, a new guide rail, a more uniform travel lane, improved curbing and a new ADA-compliant crosswalk according to project representatives.

The locally administered federal aid project, now in the preliminary design phase, is expected to start next spring and last through the summer of 2025. There will be detour signs rerouting traffic during the construction period, Dale said.

The county DOT is hosting a public information website for the proposed rehabilitation project through Friday, June 28. To access the site, visit ongov.net, follow the project link near the top of the screen, and click the “Contact Us” tab to find the open comment mail-in form for submitting written input.