BWOODBY@CULLMANTIMES.COM



Some county residents will need to find alternate routes for the next two months around a bridge county crews will be replacing.

County engineers issued an emergency road closing for County Road 1492 at the intersection of County Road 1459 and County Road 1494 to replace the bridge.

“The bridge kind of went bad,” said John Easterwood, coordinator with the Cullman County Engineering Department. “Ain’t nobody going to fall through it or anything.”

Easterwood said the department just noticed the concrete on the bridge had cracked and issued an emergency replacement notice to alert emergency personnel and school transportation to the sudden closure.

“We usually give those people a little more time than a week to re-route all of their traffic,” he said. “But we didn’t have a lot of time to take notice.”

Easterwood said the department just learned of the bridge’s condition last week and scheduled the maintenance as quickly as possible to keep it from posing a threat to safety.

“It’s not a safety problem, but you wouldn’t want to go on it with a great, heavy load like log trucks,” he said. “We don’t think it would fall.”

Easterwood said the roads leading to the bridge should be closed for about eight weeks, depending on the weather, but there are alternate routes drivers can take to bypass the construction.

“We’re going to re-do the headwall and pour a new deck on it. We may possibly go ahead and widen the bridge,” Easterwood said. “We’re going to upgrade it some, since we’re already working on it.”

Materials for the project should cost approximately $25,000 while county crews are set to do all the work.

Easterwood said residents who usually travel the road can take County Road 1494 to County Road 1459, or use County Road 1459 to loop to County Road 1492, then go to County Road 1488 on to County Road 1490 and finally back to County Road 1494.