WELSH — The town council could reconsider a November decision to not spend money to reopen the Nichols Street bridge until more permanent repairs could be made to secure the structure.
The bridge was closed in late July after a state inspection found a pile cap under the substructure had rotated and that piles under the caps had cracked under stress.
During the first meeting of the newly elected council Tuesday, officials agreed to explore new options to repair the bridge and reopen it to traffic.
“The last council said we wouldn’t fix the bridge until we could build a new one,” Mayor Carolyn Louviere said. “With the new council we wanted to bring it forth again and discuss it further.”
Louviere said the town has about five bridges that constantly need repair or upkeep.
“We have one bridge that is out, and we aren’t fixing it until we can build a new one,” she said. “What if another bridge goes out? If we don’t fix something that’s broken, what are we going to do when the next one breaks and the next one?”
The bridge cannot be fixed without the approval of the council, town engineers and the state Department of Transportation and Development, she said.
“I’m for fixing the bridge because I know if we don’t fix that and down the road we have some others going out, we are going to wind up with more than one bridge in town that is out and we are really going to be in trouble,” she said.
Resident David Faul said the Nichols Street bridge is “one of the better” bridges in town, but keeps being closed. “We don’t want it sitting closed for another two or three years,” Faul said.
The part of the bridge that needs to be repaired is at the end, Louviere said. “The whole bridge is good up to the end, so there’s no reason to tear it all out when most of the bridge is OK,” she said.
Town superintendent Wayne Hebert said engineers have agreed that putting a beam underneath the bad end of the bridge against the rotated bridge cap and driving two pylons in place would eliminate having to remove the bridge deck.
The council balked at repairing the bridge in November after town engineer Bryon Racca referred to plans to repair the bridge as a “Band-Aid” approach. Louviere said Racca should have never used the word to describe plans to fix the bridge.
The council heavily weighed its decision to keep the bridge closed because the word “Band-Aid” was used, councilman Bob Owens said.
“We couldn’t in good conscious keep putting money into something we are going to have to fix every couple of years,” Owens said. “It makes no sense throwing money away.”
Councilman Lawrence Mier wants the council to consider all the options before making a final decision. “When they said ‘Band-Aid’ it sounded bad,” Mier said. “There are numerous options to fix this, and I’m not sure if all have been looked at.”
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