Bridging the gap: How aging bridges could have disastrous consequences for Centre County

Bridges are vital to how people in Centre County go about day-to-day activities. Bridges connect communities and businesses together, and they keep things flowing smoothly.

However, while these structures look sturdy, many bridges greatly need repairs. Bridges across the entire state of Pennsylvania need lots of maintenance.

 

Bridges all across Pennsylvania need massive repairs, like this one here in Centre County

Pennsylvania currently has over 2,500 bridges that are in poor condition, which is the second most in the entire country. Even though a bridge has a design life of 50-75 years, these structures often need repairs much sooner, and the funding to perform these fixes isn’t available.

Peter Kempf is a senior civil manager for PennDOT, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. Kempf shed some light onto just how much more funding is needed to truly fix all these bridges.

While bridges have a great deal of importance in the eyes of PennDOT, Kempf said the massive deficit PennDOT faces makes it impossible to perform all the necessary construction.

“On a state-wide level, we have about an $8 billion dollar a year shortfall on the budget, so we have to prioritize,” Kempf said. “A bridge would be a very high priority.”

These bridges serve thousands every single day. People in local Centre County communities would suffer greatly without these steel structures.

One such community that has benefitted from bridge repairs is Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.

Veterans Bridge in Bellefonte plays an important role in keeping the community together. The bridge carries 1,500 passengers every single day over Spring Creek and into Bellefonte.

While Veterans Bridge is structurally sound now, it wasn’t just 22 years ago.

Bridges have a sufficiency rating from 0-100. A high rating means the bridge can sufficiently serve a community and be an important piece of infrastructure. A low rating means the bridge can’t efficiently do its job, and there needs to be renovations and fixes to help sufficiently serve the people of these cities.

Prior to repairs in 1999, Veterans Bridge had a rating of 45.5, which gave the bridge a poor condition rating. After renovations, the bridge’s sufficiency rating jumped to 98.6.

These renovations have helped keep the bridge in service, which means that the citizens of Bellefonte can go about their everyday lives uninterrupted.

Even though bridges are designed to be made of steel and concrete, they are truly made up of the needs and desires of communities. As Kempf notes, the main driving force behind a bridge’s design is connection.

“A bridge by nature brings two communities together, so when we have a bridge that needs maintenance work or needs to be reconstructed, those two communities that were together have a sense of divide,” Kempf said.

These Centre County communities depend on bridges. One such example is Veterans Bridge in Milesburg, Pennsylvania.

This Veterans Bridge (different from the Veterans Bridge in Bellefonte) serves over 10,000 passengers a day.

However, this bridge needs repairs estimated at over $1.4 million.

Without the bridge, businesses would suffer and community members would be forced to change how they conduct themselves every day,

One Milesburg citizen that would be impacted is Laurabel Castro.

Laurabel Castro is a citizen of Milesburg that depends on the bridge every single day

Castro is a member of the Milesburg community, and her father and grandfather are two individuals for which the bridge honors as veterans from the local community.

When asked what the community would be like without the bridge, Castro used one word: lost.

“There’s just no other way of connecting the communities at this point,” Castro said. “It’s an integral part of keeping the community united and together.”

Bridges are not just construction projects designed to move cars across streams and rivers; rather, they are pieces of the community that symbolize what these towns and people stand for.

Without bridges, whole communities would suffer and need to change everything about how they function.

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