Pomeroy-Mason Bridge: Too much

If I read the numbers right, about 10,500 cars cross the old Pomeroy-Mason Bridge (background) each day. I suspect many of them are Meigs County, Ohio, residents on their way to the Wal-Mart Supercenter on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River. The old bridge has two lanes. It opened in 1928. According to the National Bridge Inventory, it is listed as "structurally deficient." No doubt it is also functionally obsolete. It has a sufficiency rating of 2. That is the same rating as the bridge over the Guyandotte River in Huntington that was closed for structural problems, and it's the same rating as the pink bridge near Ritter Park.

Going up and down the river for some comparisons, about 25,500 cars use the four-lane Silver Memorial Bridge daily between Gallipolis, Ohio, and Point Pleasant, W.Va. About 16,000 a day use Huntington's East End bridge. And about 2,600 use the two-lane William S. Ritchie Bridge over the Ohio River at Ravenswood.

The Silver Memorial and Ritchie bridges are plain old steel bridges, while the East End bridge uses the cable stay design. When the Ohio Department of Transportation decided to replace the Pomeroy-Mason Bridge, it went with the cable stay design, just as it did in Ironton to replace the old Ironton-Russell Bridge (sufficiency rating 7.2).

The project at Pomeroy has been plagued with problems. Likewise, the project at Ironton. Only at Pomeroy, problems came after construction on the new cable stay brige started. In Ironton, they came as ODOT tried to design a fancy new cable stay bridge to replace the old one, which opened in 1922. Construction bids came in far over ODOT's estimate.

Both cases suffer similar flaws. The replacement bridges were to big, too expensive and just too much. ODOT could have gone with a steel bridge like you see about anywhere else along the river. I'll admit I prefer the cable stay design aesthetically, but you have to consider money, too.

The new Pomeroy-Mason bridge will end up costing about $65 million. Surely, ODOT could have spent less on a steel bridge and used the savings elsewhere. Perhaps now people at the agency wish they had.