Shortly after the I-35W bridge disaster, an effort was made to inspect all truss bridges in the State of Minnesota. This project was undertaken just to make sure that nothing significant had been missed in previous inspections. When the county highway engineer from Lac Qui Parle County inspected this bridge, he found a serious structural problem with the floor beams. The bridge was posted with very strict 10 ton weight limit on October, 24, 2007. That would buy time to make a decision on the future of the structure.

After further review, it looks like yet another truss bridge will bite the dust. The steel was too far gone to save, so the bridge will be removed and replaced. In these photos, we see that most of the bridge has been removed as of June, 2008. The parts remaining are the truss steel and the two river channel piers.

The new bridge will be bridge #37552. While I have not found definitive specs on the new bridge, it appears that it will be 143 feet long and 35 feet wide. Duininck Brothers, Inc, was the low bidder on the project. They bid $22,000 to remove the old bridge, and $498,530 to build the new bridge. This was about 13% higher than the construction estimate that was prepared by the design engineer.

Update—as of July 2008, bridge #5890 is completely gone. As the final photo below shows, the new bridge project is well underway.

The photo above is a view of the truss span as seen from a boat ramp located just northwest of the river crossing. While it looks like the highway fill extends up to the truss span, there is actually a gap on each side of the truss that was bridged by short concrete girder spans.

The photo above is looking southeast towards of the main truss span of the highway 15 and highway 19 bridge from the Big Stone county side of the river. The photo below is looking northeast towards the bridge truss from the Lac Qui Parle county side of the river.

The photo above is looking directly south down the length of the bridge truss. The photo below is the same view, but looking north towards the Big Stone county side of the river.

The photo above is another view looking south towards the remains of the highway 15 and highway 19 bridge. The bridge formerly had a concrete girder span on each side of the main channel truss span. The photo below is a view from July, 2008. The old bridge is completely gone and work is underway to build a mid-channel pier for the new structure.