Old Willard Bridge Gone

From the Capital-Journal:

ON THE KAW — The skeletal steel and concrete remnants of the half-century-old Willard Bridge stretched across the Kansas River for the last time Wednesday.

With a short series of flashes and an echoing bang, the bridge’s steel trestles tumbled into the river with little ceremony.

The demolition of the bridge, built in 1955, capped a more than $18 million project replacing the failing structure that carried Carlson Road across the river with a new bridge expected to last 100 years.

The explosion was a fitting end for the old bridge, Shawnee County commissioner Shelly Buhler said from a sandbar upstream from the blast. Since the early 2000s when she was mayor of nearby Rossville, Buhler has kept a file on the bridge’s condition and fought as a commissioner to secure funding for its replacement.

“I knew I needed to see it,” she said as she thought about the moment, calling the explosion “impressive.”

“I don’t know that I have any words. It’s weird,” she said. “It’s the final piece of the whole project.”

Tom Vlach, Shawnee County public works director, joined Buhler with a handful of construction employees. With the exception of notices sent to residents within the 1,500-foot blast zone, the demolition wasn’t made public so spectators wouldn’t crowd around the river banks, Vlach said.

“I didn’t even disclose when I went to the Rossville coffee shop,” Buhler said.

Though the old Willard Bridge was rehabbed in 1983, age failed it slowly.

The county first lowered the bridge’s weight limit in 2007 because of concerns it could collapse. A 2009 assessment found heavy corrosion on metal pins supporting the bridge that could cause them to fail. The bridge is the same type as the Interstate 35 bridge in Minneapolis that collapsed in August 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145.

After a series of weight-limit reductions in 2015 the brought its maximum weight to 9 tons, the bridge that previously carried farm equipment and school buses between Willard and Rossville in rural Shawnee County could only hold passenger cars.

Just 25 or 30 pounds of RDX explosive, a compound NASA developed to separate rocket boosters, brought the metal frames down with a splash, Ryan Redyke with Tulsa-based Dykon said. The demolition company has collapsed dozens of bridges making Willard “pretty straight forward.”

“(RDX) cuts metal like a torch,” he said casually. “Not a lot of troubled need.”

On Thursday a crew from contractor A.W. Cohron and Son will remove the metal and cut the concrete support towers down.

Wednesday’s blast was no-frills, but Buhler and hundreds of others were excited to christen the new bridge in August. Nearly 300, including Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer attended an opening ceremony where Buhler was the first to drive across the new bridge.

With a hard concrete deck instead of a steal grate, wider shoulders, and a bike and walking path on the east side, the new bridge marks a major success for the county’s public works department. The project cost nearly $7 million less than expected and was completed ahead of a December deadline.