By Brandon Shulleeta
The Daily Progress
ALBEMARLE COUNTY, Va. — After more than a yearlong battle, timber deck on the Broomley Road bridge is being repaired this week.
But that won’t solve what residents and local officials see as a major problem — the bridge has been deemed too weak to allow firetrucks to cross.
Albemarle County Supervisor Dennis S. Rooker says the bridge causes “a safety problem for the residents that live in that area,” but his mission to have the bridge replaced by one that can support more weight faces political and financial obstacles.
Albemarle County has about $2 million from the Virginia Department of Transportation slated for unpaved road projects. County officials have shown interest in using that money toward replacing the Broomley Road bridge, but doing so would mean the state could penalize the county hundreds of thousands of dollars in future funding for failing to use the money as it was intended.
Supervisors plan to ask that the Virginia General Assembly save the county from such a penalty.
“It’s ridiculous,” Rooker said. “It seems to make a lot of common sense to give localities some flexibility with their funds at time when they basically don’t have any.”
Residents in the Flordon area of the county have been rallying for something to be done about the old bridge.
One resident who lives about a block from the bridge said that trees in her yard caught fire several years ago. But as the flames were nearing her house, it took firefighters about 45 minutes to arrive to the scene.
“It adds a longer response to any of those homes that are on the other side of the bridge there,” Albemarle Fire-Rescue Chief Dan Eggleston said of the bridge, which forces firefighters to take an alternative route.
Local officials have estimated that it would cost a few million dollars to replace the existing bridge over the Buckingham Branch Railroad, though no exact figure has been determined. Rooker estimated that the approximately $2 million he wants taken from a project to pave portions of Dickerson Road likely would cover about 70 percent of the costs to replace the Broomley Road bridge.
County officials have lost hope that they’ll be able to complete the Dickerson Road project anytime soon. It would cost about $12 million, but no such money is available.
The Broomley Road bridge is owned by CSX and leased to the Buckingham Branch Railroad, which has the obligation to maintain it, according to Rooker. But the Broomley Road bridge isn’t the only one that creates problems for firefighters.
“We do have issues in other parts of the county,” Eggleston said. “They’re all over. North, south, east, west. Basically, we have bridges that are very much like the Broomley Road bridge that go over the railroad tracks [and] are not necessarily owned by VDOT but are older type bridges that just don’t have the capacity to support some of our firetrucks.”
Supervisor Kenneth C. Boyd said that there’s no danger of the bridges falling, but they’re deemed unable to support the weight of large vehicles such as firetrucks. Rescue squad trucks can, however, cross the existing Broomley Road bridge.
“We’re very concerned about the citizens in this community and we’re going to do whatever we can do to improve the safety of those bridges,” Boyd said.
Progress is being made to build a permanent bridge over the North Fork Rivanna River in northern Albemarle. The new $3 million steel truss bridge will hold full-load, two-way traffic to replace the closed Advance Mills Bridge.
The former bridge was deemed unsafe for traffic in April 2007 and was closed, leaving the community split and causing long detour routes. But Supervisor Ann H. Mallek said that workers hope to have the new bridge completed as soon as October.
Eggleston said that rural localities throughout the country, in which there tends to be a lot of aging infrastructure, are facing problems with bridges. And he doesn’t expect Albemarle’s woes to disappear anytime soon.
“We just don’t have a lot of support at the state level, because of the lack of funding. It’s very frustrating,” Eggleston said. “They need to be replaced. And sometimes it’s not maybe [as] high on the priority list as what we think it should be.”
Copyright 2009 The Clover Herald (South Carolina)