HANCEVILLE — Water can do a number on concrete and asphalt, even when man-made engineering’s designed to withstand most of what nature can throw at it. After enduring a pair of early spring floods last month, the little blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bridge along Styles Street in Hanceville finally threw in the towel with last week’s rains, its underlying support structure shearing away from the bridge itself and cracking the pavement above.

The city has closed the bridge at least through June, when Hanceville’s public works department can assemble new materials to make the needed repairs. Thankfully, the closure won’t deny any local residents access to their homes; it’ll just force a detour for anyone traveling to or from the Jack’s restaurant intersection with U.S. Highway 31, only a few hundred yards from the bridge site.

The Hanceville City Council on Thursday approved $25,935 in non-budgeted funds for the repairs — a relative bargain made possible by the public works department’s ability to do the repair work in-house. Superintendent Rusty Fields said motorists traveling along Styles Street noticed the buckling and cracked pavement earlier this week, and notified the city that something was amiss.

“We went over and looked at it, and the damage is pretty obvious once you get underneath and see where the headwall has begun to separate from the bridge,” he said Friday. “Water did come up to the road surface during the rains we had last week, and it scoured out the soil behind the headwall and started creating some pretty big cracks.”

Fields said his department will likely demolish the structure and start from scratch, installing three 60-inch culverts with backfill and pouring a cement slab, rather than asphalt, as a replacement road surface up top. “Weather permitting, we’re hoping to start in June,” he said. “But that section of road will be temporarily closed until we can fix it.

“The cost is really cheap, considering the extent of the damage and what’s involved,” he added. “We’re doing all the work ourselves, but we’ll still have to pay for design work and permits before we can source materials and begin the work.”