By: Brian W. Budzynski
Originally completed in 1928, the Champ Clark Bridge—so named for a former Missouri Speaker of the House—stood as a landmark along the Mississippi River for nearly a century.
But like all man-made creations, its serviceable life eventually and inevitably came to an end—and a new alternative was required. The bridge linked Louisiana, Missouri, an area of rolling hills that feature quite a lot of agricultural development, with Pittsfield, Illinois, where the soils are classically rich river bottom soils, ideal for farming. Its replacement structure now carries the same burden of community connection. What was once just 20 ft wide, with extremely narrow 10-ft shoulderless travel lanes now boasts a pair of 12-ft driving lanes and 10-ft shoulders in each direction, more than doubling the traversable width. For a rural area that has farming equipment as a regular part of the overall traffic mix, this improvement has been long overdue.
We first covered this bridge replacement project in our May 2019 issue. At that time, contributing author Lisa Schoolcraft quoted Missouri DOT Project Director Keith A. Killen as saying, “‘When combines go across, the police shut down the bridge. This also happens frequently with large loads. The new bridge will be an amazing improvement for the community.’”
Right he was. Roads & Bridges had the chance to speak with Killen recently about this project, and now that the bridge is open to traffic, he touted the safety improvements the new structure offers.
“There weren’t necessarily backups on the old bridge,” he said. “Traffic is light enough at about 4,200 vehicles per day that it was usually just a matter of things slowing down. The old bridge had a posted speed limit of 30 mph, and people would often drive slower than that over it. But there were some crashes, though it didn’t rise to a level of being worse than other river crossings. What there were a lot of were side swipes and mirrors getting clipped off due to the narrow lanes. With the wider lanes and shoulders, we expect to see that greatly reduced.”
Due to the length of the cross-river spans, designers opted for steel girders over precast concrete, though precast did come into play elsewhere in the project. “It made more sense to use steel on the river spans,” Terrence J. Colombatto, project manager for contractor Massman Construction Company, told Roads & Bridges. “The spans range from 260 ft to 420 ft in this area, and had we chosen concrete on those spans, we would have had to shorten the spans or go with a post-tensioned spliced concrete girder. We also would not have been able, likely, to reduce the piers in the river. But we did use precast on the approach spans. There are three approach spans we used concrete girders on.”
