Hawkins County Commissioners are looking for ways to pay for an imminent Goshen Valley Road bridge replacement, as well as what can be done to preserve the bridge until funding is available
A main concern is heavy tractor-trailer traffic using the 60-year-old bridge over the Holston River, which was recommended for replacement in a 2021 Tennessee Department of Transportation inspection report.
A recent National Bridge Tennessee Inventory and Appraisal report states the Goshen Valley Bridge was reduced to a 10-ton limit after scoring a sufficiency rating of 6 out of 100.
“That’s about as bad as you can get,” said Road Committee member Jeff Barrett. “In an inspection report from 2021 TDOT recommends that the bridge be replaced. In 2021 they estimated a project cost on that bridge $14.3 million.”
Barrett added, “I want to bring the condition of the bridge to the committee. That’s something that needs to be looked at and addressed for funding or grants. I don’t want the committee to be blindsided next year or two years down the road if a truck or two school buses go over that bridge and it falls, and it comes out that nobody said anything about it.”
GPS part of the problem
Highway superintendent Danny Jones told the committee that the bridge is “beyond repair”.
“All the rollers and the bearings need to be replaced,” Jones said. “Some of the pillars are rotten. Some of the cross-members under the bridge are rotten. It’s just about a total.”
Jones added, “Any bridge in Hawkins county over 20 foot in length is inspected by the state every 2-3 years, and they tell you what to do to it. The last time they inspected it they dropped it to 10 tons and said to pray that two tractor-trailers following each other don’t hit their brakes on the bridge.”
Raising $14 million to replace the bridge is a long-term goal. The county commission’s Road Committee discussed short term goals last week including finding a way to keep heavy tractor trailers off the bridge.
Hawkins County Emergency Management Agency director Jamie Miller said tractor-trailer drivers hauling 80,000 are being led through rural two-lane areas of Hawkins County by GPS going between Cardinal Glass and I-81 because that’s the shortest distance.
“I’ve found them on Red Hill, with power lines and telephone lines hooked to them,” Miller said. “It sends them from the Baileyton exit to Rt. 70, and they’ll get on those back roads, and they’ll end up in Goshen Valley.”
Committee members suggested posting signs warning truckers of the upcoming bridge weight restrictions. One concern for that solution is the fact that by the time truckers reach that point, there’s nowhere to turn around, and they have no choice but to keep moving forward.
‘We’ve got to do something’
Commissioner Jason Roach, who chairs the Budget Committee, said the only way Hawkins County could pay to replace that bridge is with a bond issue.
Hawkins County currently has $1.5 million in its bridge repair budget line-item, which Jones said probably wouldn’t be enough to pay for the engineering on a new Goshen Valley bridge.
“From what I’m hearing you say, if it was built in 1964, and it’s rated 6 out of 100, I don’t know that it’s got another 5-10 year life,” Roach said. “We’ve got to do something, maybe not tomorrow, but it’s got to be pretty soon. I don’t want to go in debt. But, at the same time there’s a lot of traffic that goes across that bridge. I crossed it twice yesterday.”
Jones noted that in a recent crash on the bridge a Saturn knocked out a 20 foot section of the concrete decking.
“That’s how rotten it is,” Jones added. “It wasn’t that big of a hit, but it’s like powder.”
Roach added, “If we know we’ve got a problem and we aren’t fixing it, we’re being negligent.”
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