View Colorado’s Poor-Rated State Highway Bridges in a larger map

Click on the four balloons above to get data on the wooden bridges CDOT will replace early next year as part of the FASTER bridge safety program.

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

The Great Depression was a time of significant road building meant to get Americans back to work as well as back on the road, and out on the eastern plains of Colorado a number of highway bridges were erected.

Some were steel and concrete, but at least six of them on CO 96 in Crowley and Kiowa counties were made of wood.

Many of these old bridges remain in service today. In fact, six of the 17 bridges along CO 96 as it wends its way toward Kansas through the two rural counties were in place in the 1930s.

But early next year along this lengthy, lonesome and windblown stretch of two-lane road, four wooden bridges will be replaced with funds now being collected from Colorado automobile owners under the new FASTER bill.

FASTER set up an earmarked annual fund for bridge replacements with $9 this year for the average auto, rising to $18 two years from now. In August, the Colorado Transportation Commission selected 17 bridges around the state for replacement this coming year with FASTER’s initial revenue.

To have nearly one-fourth of them bunched together on a 27-mile piece of CO 96 between Sugar City and Haswell is unusual given the statewide scope of FASTER. When they’re done, there will be only one wooden bridge structure remaining along CO 96 in Kiowa and Crowley counties, that being a small span over a normally dry draw seven miles west of Eads.

Save for a terrible event a year and a half ago, one other Depression-era wooden bridge on CO 96 would have been on the list. It was destroyed when a wildfire swept eastward along the highway toward the town of Ordway and burned its wooden substructure, collapsing the 47-foot span into the Numa Drain Canal.

Thick smoke from burning grass was blowing across the roadway as a fire truck from the nearby Olney Springs volunteer fire department rushed to help defend Ordway. It obscured the view of the missing bridge. The truck went over the abutment into the abyss and crashed into the canal, killing the chief of the Olney Springs volunteers, Terry DeVore, and fellow firefighter John Schwartz. Each man was a father to four childen.

Randy Haynes, the mayor of Ordway, said the communities along CO 96 will never forget the two men who died while assisting on one of the most disastrous days to strike the town. Two dozen buildings were destroyed or damaged that day, the fire cutting a haphazard path across the town.

Haynes had worked with DeVore and Schwartz at the nearby Ordway prison.

“They gave the ultimate sacrifice for our community,” Haynes said. “We’ll always owe a debt of gratitude to them and their families.”

Wooden bridges can make for sturdy structures, and properly maintained, can have a long service life. It’s been a while since the Colorado Department of Transportation last erected a wood bridge in 1963. That was in this same southeast Colorado region, on CO 233 — Baxter Road in Baxter, Pueblo County, over an Arkansas River overflow channel. But cities, counties and the U.S. Forest Service still build them with some regularity. Thirty-one wood bridges were built in Colorado in the 1990s, and the last one went up in Grand Lake in 2001.

“I know some years back there was more of a push to start looking at building with timber again, but we haven’t done any,” said Paul Westoff, Region 2 resident engineer in CDOT’s Lamar office. “But our maintenance forces like to salvage that stuff and use it for repairs.”

CDOT put in temporary culverts, concrete rail and asphalt paving to reopen the crossing within two days after the firefighters died. The old bridge over the Numa Drain Canal had been built in 1937 and at the time it burned in the wildfire of April 15, 2008, it was the poorest rated state highway bridge in Crowley County with a sufficiency rating of 30.9 on a scale of 100. Bridges that fall below 50 are rated poor.

Haynes welcomed the news that four other wood bridges will be replaced along the CO 96 corridor here.

“Any time that we can get those agencies into our community to do some work, it’s going to help improve the community here and the county as a whole,” the Ordway mayor said.

Westoff said CDOT’s decision to replace four of the other wooden bridges wasn’t based on the tragedy in Ordway. All four are poor-rated structures that were already on the list for replacement. When they are done, there will be no more poor-rated state highway bridges in either Crowley or Kiowa County.

Still, the transportation commission could have picked others. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of candidates. Statewide, 124 bridges on the CDOT system are rated poor. Of those, 43 bridges, a disproportionate 35 percent of the total, are in Region 2, which encompasses 13 counties in southeast Colorado including El Paso and Teller. Only Region 6, the Denver metro area, has more at 46.

Westoff said FASTER funds will supplement previously allocated money for one of the bridge replacements, over Black Draw about three and a half miles east of Sugar City. That one was built in 1932. One other bridge had qualified for design money to get plans for replacement going.

FASTER means all four can be replaced immediately.

Westoff said CDOT plans to package them into a single contract and seek what’s called a “modified design-build” delivery method.

Instead of the traditional method in which CDOT designs or hires a firm to design the new structures, the bidders will be asked to supply both design and construction of all four. But unlike design-build, in which proposals are sought based on best overall value and not strictly low-bid, this job will go to the lowest-price qualified bidder, Westoff said.

“We’re excited about doing this as a design-build because we hope to get some innovative ideas from the builders as to how to save money,” he said. Since CDOT already owns a 100-foot right-of-way, there will be no land acquisition to complicate the process.

“We’d like to get to advertisement after the first of the year,” Westoff said. “By putting it into one package, it should be a cost savings.”

CO 96 hugs the old Union Pacific Railroad Towner line tracks out of Pueblo east to Kansas. UP intended to abandon it, and CDOT bought it in 1998 to preserve the tracks. It is operated by the V&S Railway of Salt Lake City.

Says Colorado highway historian and chronicler Matt Salek, CO 96 is an original 1920s state highway. It covers 207 miles from Westcliffe through Pueblo and east through Towner into Kansas, where it continues most of the way through that state as KS 96, still paralleling the railroad track. Its routing through the city of Pueblo hasn’t changed since the 1920s, and the Fourth Street Bridge replacement project across the Arkansas River there is also replacing a poor-rated bridge on CO 96.

If you enjoy highway stats, history, guides and photos, surf on over to Salek’s site at Highways of Colorado. Here is his page on CO 96.