ROANOKE, Va. – We're getting our first look at what a new bridge in Roanoke may look like and learning more on the intricate process that will go on behind the scenes to make it happen.
The Wasena Bridge near downtown Roanoke will be out for a few years as there is no good way to re-build it while it is open. But locals are keeping the payoff in mind.
The bridge was built in 1939 and while still perfectly safe, is already past its useful life. It's structurally deficient and has been on the list to be replaced. The new bridge wouldn't just be a way to get from point A to point B, it would become point B.
Very rarely do you get a chance to do a complete do-over, but that's exactly what is on the table right now and is a once in a lifetime chance.
"You've got three neighborhoods around this one bridge so we want to do something that the community, the neighborhoods around this bridge would appreciate," Roanoke City Civil Engineer Josephus Johnson-Koroma said.
Roanoke City leaders are getting that chance on the Wasena Bridge. Despite objections by some advocates, city engineers and council have decided the bridge needs to go. Its cold, brutalist architecture will go with it in favor of something completely new.
"(The plan is) to make this more of an iconic, signature structure that really draws people to the park (below) and that makes the park a destination," Mattern & Craig Engineers Principal Chad Thomas said. "A place where people want to come, want to play, want to bring their kids."
Thursday night the Wasena Neighborhood Forum got its first look a the bridge concept and even though construction will snip the arterial connecting the neighborhood to downtown for a few years, people are still excited.
"Obviously this is very early on, but I like what I saw," neighborhood forum President Jim Hosch said.
The crowd was receptive of the draft concepts and renderings of what the bridge could look like. The plan includes a series of generous arches, attention to detail, and overlooks to provide river and mountain views. The plan is to make the bridge a destination within itself.
"Everyone forgets, but Wasena means beautiful view and I think this is going to leverage that quite well," Hosch said.
Like the Franklin Road bridge project before it, the Wasena Bridge also crosses active railroad tracks, which is a major construction hurdle. Several reviews are needed by all parties before any plan even gets printed to make sure it's as efficient as possible.
"We haven't even started that one yet and then we have to go through the construction phase of that too," Johnson-Koroma said. "So it's a headache, but we will jump into that hole when we get to that point."
The current bridge was only expected to last 60-70 years and is what's known as a fracture-critical bridge which means one failure could cause catastrophic collapse. The new bridge will be designed with multiple redundancies in place and is expected to last 100 years.
Construction is set to begin in 2022 and the price tag is about $30 million. Designers are expected to present more realistic and final versions of the draft later this spring.
Good news for drivers, this is the last major bridge project to be completed in the city.