DUNBAR, W.Va. — The West Virginia Department of Transportation is beginning the public involvement process of the Dunbar Toll Bridge Project.
The WVDOT held its first public meeting where community members could ask questions and get informed on potential plans for the bridge.
The Dunbar Toll Bridge, which connects the Dunbar and South Charleston communities, was built in 1953, and Travis Long, the director of the Technical Support and Services Division of the WVDOT, says he understands the workload and importance of the bridge.
Travis Long
“It is historic, it is very important to these two communities, to South Charleston and to Dunbar,” Long said Tuesday evening. “About 15,000 vehicles a day, maybe around 100 people use it as well, so it has a pedestrian aspect to it. It connects these communities together and has over the years.”
While the bridge is historic, it needs attention, as rust has been noticeable all over the steel for years, and the structure as a whole has been deemed outdated.
Rick Atkinson, a longtime resident of South Charleston, says he has gotten lots of use out of the bridge over the years, but he knows it likely needs a newer replacement.
“No disputing that the bridge needs replaced, it’s close to 70 years old,” Atkinson said before going into the public forum. “I go across it quite often, and there are structural defects in it.”
Long says the bridge is in such a shape that routine maintenance won’t get the job done moving forward.
“It’s gotten to the place where it’s getting to an age where rehabs are just not going to work, so we’ve got to make some decisions” Long said. “We are looking at five alternatives.”
The alternatives the WVDOT put on the table Tuesday evening are as follows:
- No build, or “do nothing” but continue routine maintenance
- Rehabilitation in the existing location
- Replacement in the same location
- Replacement in a parallel location slightly east
Long says the type of steel structure of the bridge being built was not uncommon for the time, but those structures seem to take more of a noticeable beating over the years.
“They are also historically bad about rusting and deteriorating over time,” Long said. “They take all the weather on them where now, we lean more towards an under or a deck truss so all the steel will be under the deck, maybe a little more protected, maybe last a little bit longer.”
In addition, the Dunbar Toll Bridge poses additional challenges in maintenance that most modern bridges don’t.
“They’re really hard to work on,” Long said. “You’ll see us a lot of times work on a bridge, we’ll split the deck in half, traffic over to one side while we’re working building a new bridge and switch it back over. You’ll see that on I-64, on I-79, that’s a very frequent thing we do now. This bridge does not lend itself to that type of construction. We can’t do that.”
While no decisions are scheduled to be made before the end of the year, Long says the public turnout was a great start to the long process.
“We were overwhelmed, which that’s what we want to see. The worst thing we can have is have people not take interest in it, and then be surprised later, so we want to engage with them now,” Long said. “We’ve talked with property owners that live right up against the bridge, we’ve talked with property owners that live on the other side of Dunbar on the lower end towards Institute, and then property owners here in South Charleston and business owners here in South Charleston, so this is exactly what this is meant to do.”
Long and other workers with the WVDOT said they anticipate future public forums regarding the bridge.