With the Spiketon Bridge closed for the foreseeable future and impacting roughly 5,600 drivers every day, residents of Buckley and South Prairie are wondering how to expedite some sort of recourse.

The state Route 162 bridge closed suddenly Aug. 16, after work crews discovered a pier had sunk into the ground, making the bridge unsafe to drive over.

On Sept. 10, roughly two dozen area residents met in a private home with Sen. Phil Fortunato to discuss the options being presented to them, not just for the bridge but also for making the Lower Burnett Road a safer place to live and drive.

After introductions, Fortunato laid out the three most obvious options the Washington State Department of Transportation is considering; repairing the current bridge, bringing in a temporary bridge, or simply replacing the bridge.

Any plan, he said, could take a while.

According to Claudia Bingham-Baker, spokesperson for the DOT’s Olympic Region, repairing the bridge — which entails reinforcing the Spiketon Bridge to redistribute weight across the structure — is not a viable option.

First, it would cost just over than $2 million, and second, it would take an estimated 13 months to design and construct the repairs, and an unknown amount of time to get permitting for those repairs, Bingham-Baker said.

“And when you’re done, you still have an 83-year old bridge that is… looking at being at the end of its useful life,” she added.

Bringing in a temporary bridge has its own issues as well.

First, the “span is too long” for the DOT to bring in a full temporary bridge, Bingham-Baker said.

That leaves bringing in a section of a temporary bridge that could safely allow cars to pass over the settled portion of the Spiketon Bridge.

According to Chris Keegan, a DOT operations engineer that oversees bridge maintenance around the state, said the department is considering two options; a Bailey temporary bridge or an Acrow temporary bridge.

DOT already owns some Bailey equipment, Keegan said. However, the Bailey bridge would only be one lane wide, so while the department wouldn’t have to buy or rent the partial bridge, it would have to figure out how to manage alternating traffic across the bridge, which would “back traffic up past the intersection on both ends of the bridge,” Keegan added. “It’ll really tie up traffic.

The other option is buying or renting Acrow equipment, which would be two lanes wide, but Keegan said engineers are still trying to figure out if the Spiketon Bridge can handle that sort of weight.

So far, the DOT is still trying to figure out whether a partial temporary bridge is feasible, Bingham-Baker said, and hasn’t established an estimated cost or timeline.

The third option is simply replacing the bridge, which the DOT was already planning to do in 2022 when funds were scheduled to be made available for the department to tackle the project.

However, area residents made it clear they would not be happy if they had to wait several years for a new bridge.

In an interview after the community meeting, Fortunato said he’s focusing on bringing in an partial Acrow bridge, which he said could go up as quickly as two months after the DOT gives the signal.

Bingham-Baker could not confirm this estimated timeline.

Fortunato also said the DOT could use the money it was planning to spend on deck repairs for the bridge before crews noticed the sunken pier — around $140,000 — on a partial temporary bridge, because “it’s pretty similar in cost.”

At the end of the day, Keegan couldn’t estimate how much a partial temporary bridge and its various complications would cost, though he seemed certain options would cost more than the funds made available for deck repairs.

In the long term, Fortunato said he’s going to attempt to make the 2022 Spiketon Bridge replacement money available in 2019 when the legislature going back into session, adding that a new bridge could be up and operational by 2021.

Part of that two year timeline would include examining the two fish barriers located near the bridge; Bingham-Baker said they’re close enough to the bridge that any construction will have to take into consideration the environmental impact to those barriers.

IS THIS AN “EMERGENCY REPAIR?”

At the community meeting, Fortunato floated the idea getting this bridge project deemed an “emergency repair,” which would speed things up, especially noting that the bridge is part of the area’s volcano evacuation route.

Residents also mentioned their concerns about emergency response access. Just the day prior to the meeting, East Pierce Fire and Rescue and several other fire departments responded to a Buckley fire that burned 12 acres, a mobile home, and several other structures and vehicles.

In a press release, East Pierce stated their arrival time was delayed because the Spiketon Bridge was closed.

But the bridge wouldn’t qualify for emergency repair under federal guidelines because it’s condition wasn’t a result of a natural disaster, Bingham-Baker said.

On a more local level, declaring the bridge an emergency project “allows us to circumvent some of the normal processes that we go through, and to hire contractors much more quickly,” she added. “But if you don’t have the money, it’s not applicable in that case either.”

Fortunato, though, said the state has a “rainy day fund for emergencies… it may be possible to borrow the money from the rainy day fund until the Feds come though and replace it that way,” adding that the federal government funds the vast majority of bridge projects when the bridge in question is more than 20 feet long, whether or not the project is deemed an emergency.

OTHER ISSUES ON LOWER BURNETT

Lower Burnett Road residents are having a specific problem with the bridge being closed — apparently, GPS apps are directing drivers onto their road, which is not a part of the official DOT detour, Fortunato said.

Residents have noticed that Fettig Road, which brings drivers down to Lower Burnett from SR 165, has become especially dangerous, and Fortunato described the road as “a driveway.”

“What would happen if a car came the other way?” he continued. “They’re talking about making that one way.”

Making Lower Burnett a one-way road would mean having discussions with Pierce County and the DOT, but Bingham-Baker did say the DOT is in the process of making “local access only” signs for the entrances of Lower Burnett to discourage drivers from using the road as a detour.

Fortunato said those signs are expected to go up sometime this week.

For updates on the Spiketon Bridge, head to https://wsdotblog.blogspot.com/2018/09/whats-happening-with-sr-162-spiketon.html.