More Grand Forks County bridges repaired or replaced in 2023, but dozens still need fixing

Feb. 10—GRAND FORKS — Roughly a quarter of Grand Forks County's bridges are due for an overhaul, according to the county engineer, though the highway department has made more progress repairing or removing those structures than in years past.

Eighty-seven bridges measuring more than 20 feet in length were in need of rehabilitation or replacement in 2023, according to County Engineer Nick West. Eleven joined the list last year alone, he told the Herald in December.

Thirty-three bridges on that list have been rehabilitated, replaced or removed or have a funded plan to do so, West said.

However, problem structures longer or shorter than 20 feet continue to span the county, which has limited means to repair or replace bridges and little way of stopping people from driving overweight vehicles over them.

"When we get money, we do something good with it," West said. "But we never know when we're going to get money, so it's really hard to plan."

According to state Department of Transportation assistant bridge engineer Lindsay Bossert, Grand Forks County has more locally-owned bridges than any of North Dakota's other 52 counties, with NDDOT counting 284 local bridges. (Cass and Walsh counties rank second and third, respectively.) Grand Forks County owns 256 of those bridges.

All of the county's bridges are located in rural townships and are often used by farmers to shuttle farming equipment and their harvest on and off their properties.

Many are also decades or even up to a century old. For instance, county commissioners

approved plans in December to remove two bridges on the National Register of Historic Places

that both dated to the 1920s or earlier.

For some bridges, West noted, the first motorized vehicle to pass over them was likely a Model T.

The 87 bridges on the county rehab/replace list in 2023 either had one or more components rated "poor" by North Dakota DOT, which conducts biennial inspections of all structures longer than 20 feet, or had a weight restriction imposed on them by the state agency.

Sixty-seven bridges were subject to ton limits as of 2022, after the federal government imposed new, stricter bridge inspection standards. That was 13 more than the year before; the median weight restriction also decreased, from 29.5 tons to 14 tons.

For reference, an unladen semi-truck tractor weighs between 5 to 17.5 tons, while a 53-foot trailer weighs another 5 tons. The federal government imposes a maximum 40-ton limit for vehicles traveling on interstate highways, though state and local highways can designate their own, higher weight limits.

"It's just the trucks are getting heavier, and these bridges have been out there for 70-plus years, and they were designed for a different type of vehicle," Bossert said.

West isn't too concerned about, say, a 16-ton truck falling through a 14 ton-rated bridge, particularly with the new, more conservative federal standards.

What he is concerned about is when a truck tries to drive over a bridge carrying three times the bridge's posted ton limit, which is what happened in 2019 near Northwood, North Dakota, when

a 42-ton truck carrying dry beans fell through a 114-year-old bridge

rated to only 14 tons.

That's the last time a bridge has outright collapsed in the county — an overladen semi-truck also

brought down a Walsh County bridge in 2017

— but West worries whether other farmers are heeding the posted weight restrictions.

Farmer Greg Amundson, of Gilby, North Dakota, said that for many farmers, the ton limits are a "moot point."

He said farmers don't necessarily understand what the ton limits mean. Do the load postings indicate gross tonnage, or per axle?

Also, do drivers understand how they apply practically? For example, if a semi-truck that's 50-odd feet long goes over a 25-foot bridge, is the full weight of the truck ever actually on the bridge?

"For the most part we try to keep our loads down and comply, but you never know," he said. "It's such a gray area."

West doesn't particularly care for this line of thinking. He points out the county only posts two types of signs — one with a single (gross) weight limit, and one that specifies gross and per axle tonnage — and anybody driving a semi-truck should be able to understand both.

"Isn't it pretty clear what it means?" West said. "If you're driving a heavy vehicle, you should be held to a higher standard. You should know how to interpret a road sign."

However, laws in Minnesota and North Dakota specifically exempt farmers from needing a commercial drivers license to operate heavy vehicles, provided they're engaged in farm-to-market operations and within 150 miles of their farm.

Limited funding at the county level and the relatively low volume of traffic these bridges see make it unlikely the county will repair many of these bridges anytime soon.

"Some of these 'poor' bridges are just going to sit out there because the county isn't going to send out the money for it and instead (will) work on other things," Bossert said.

Federal COVID-19 stimulus funds and state programs like Operation Prairie Dog have helped drive the county's current upsurge in productivity — West said work had been completed on 14 of the 33 bridges the county has funding to repair — but even that comes on the heels of a multi-year slowdown that started when the COVID-19 pandemic halted construction projects and obliterated the highway department's gas tax revenues.

"We're riding a high wave right now because of the influx of money, but in 2021 we probably did two or three because we had no money," West said.

The touch-and-go nature of the county's bridge repair cropped up earlier this week, when West informed the Grand Forks County Commission that the state Department of Transportation had pulled funding for four bridges that had been slated for repairs later this year. That brought the number of bridges slated for repair, replacement or removal from 37 to 33.

West said the state's decision came because inflationary pressures on building material and labor costs reduced the number of projects the state could fund. He said he still plans to replace the bridges, possibly with local funds, but that work could be pushed back to 2025 or later.

"They're on lower priority roads — we would call them minimum-maintenance roads," West said. "They're just going to have to sit there longer until we have the money to deal with them.

Even if the county had the money to repair the remaining 54 bridges, it would still be on the hook to repair thousands of culverts and other smaller crossings measuring 20 feet or less on county and township roads, none of which qualify for federal funding.

There are so many culverts in the county, West said, that the highway department still hasn't finished an inventory of the structures that began four years ago. (He said the inventory is expected to be complete in 2024.)

In May 2021, the county highway department conducted a partial analysis of the 2,505 culverts it had surveyed at that point. It comprised about 80% of those on county (not township) roads. The department estimated that 31.5% needed to be replaced immediately.

At the time, West calculated such a project would cost the county $25.3 million, a price tag that's almost certainly gone up with inflation.

"It's just astronomical, and what happens is a lot of the dilapidated infrastructure stays out there longer than it should," West said. "And we're on borrowed time with it."