Klineline Bridge linking Highway 99 over Salmon Creek has been closed, and will remain unusable for more than a year while a new bridge is built. Clark County Public Works announced the closure Thursday after engineers concluded that recent high waters damaged the piers enough that the bridge could collapse.
“We can’t rule that out as a possibility,” said Jim Gladson, spokesman for the public works department. One way the bridge could fail would be that the structure shifts, causing the pavement to lift. “The other is the bridge ends up in the creek,” he said.
The bridge will be closed to motorized vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists. Construction on a replacement bridge is scheduled to begin in April and take up to a year. Cost is estimated at $7 million.
The existing bridge was built in 1927, when engineers could not design long spans and so piers were placed in the creek to support the bridge. In 1949, a pier was undermined and one end of the bridge dropped several feet. In 1956, water eroded the central pier and the middle of the bridge collapsed.