Dan Towers gives his eye-witness account
“It could always be worse, but that’s bad enough right there,” Greene County conservation director Dan Towers said Monday as he shared pictures with the county supervisors of the collapsed bridge over the Raccoon River on the Raccoon River Valley Trail south of Jefferson.
The 100-year-old bridge collapsed Friday. Towers saw it happen. “There was no ice jam there. It was flowing through, so it wasn’t that an ice jam put pressure on it,” he said. “When the biggest chunks came down it was like a battering ram. It’d shake the bridge. I kind of wondered what would happen if it continued.
“Pretty soon I saw some hex braces disappear, and then a pier or two, and then the cross pieces holding the load bearing parts started dropping. As soon as that happened, that 60 foot stretch just got a big gully in it. I think the rerod in the concrete deck held for a while. It sagged two foot or so.
“I went to town to get some fencing to block off the trail, and when I came back the bridge was gone.” He said it took him about 25 minutes to get the fencing and return, and by then the only ice on the river was random small chunks.
The river crested Friday at 19’ 7”, the second highest crest since 1947 and 6 inches higher than in 1993. According to Towers, six of the nine highest crests have been in the past 20 years, and half of them have been in March and included ice.
Towers has talked with county engineer Wade Weiss, who suggested that when the water level goes down the first step will be to have a bridge consultant look at it. The replacement bridge doesn’t have to meet the same weight requirements as the original bridge because the loads are lighter.
Neither Towers nor Weiss would guess how much it might cost, but Weiss said it would be expensive. There are seven or eight piers missing.
There also isn’t a timetable for replacing it. Towers hopes it will be finished before he retires in a year-and-a-half. “There’s not a lot that can be done if the river stays high all year. There are just too many variables,” Towers said.
The Raccoon River Valley Trail between 265th and 290th St is closed until further notice. County board chair John Muir said the county won’t post an alternate route, but Towers said bicyclists “will find a way.”
Weiss reported the secondary roads crew worked Saturday and Sunday on county roads, using drags to fill in the worst ruts on the unpaved roads. They started early while the road surfaces were still frozen, and worked until they thawed and got sloppy again in the afternoon.
The crew is spending Monday and Tuesday hauling material to repair places the road washed out, and by mid-week they’ll go back to running the drags, depending on road conditions. He said the drags help dry the material and level the surface.
