Last August, Smith-Rowe LLC, a contractor in Mt. Airy, N.C., began demolishing the two bridges that carry U.S. 701 over the Cape Fear River in Elizabethtown, Bladen County, N.C. The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) awarded an emergency contract worth $4.9 million in 2019, after determining that the bridge’s substructure was damaged by floodwaters from Hurricane Florence the previous year floodwaters.
In addition to demolishing the bridges, the contractor repaired scour, caused by past flooding around the bridge’s foundation, removed an obsolete fender system adjacent to this bridge that was once used for barges.
NCDOT will replace the northbound and southbound bridges with a single, fourlane bridge, which will reduce maintenance costs and lower the risk of more damage by future flooding. The bridge construction will be phased, meaning two lanes will be open for traffic in a two-way pattern throughout the project. The Federal Highway Administration will pay 80 percent of the estimated $29 million construction cost. The rest of the cost will come from the NCDOT’s highway trust fund. Smith-Rowe was awarded that work under a separate contract. Work is scheduled for completion by October 28, 2024.
The Bladen Journal in Elizabethtown reported in 2020: “It’s a complex project to maintain traffic while we build what will be a very large bridge …,” Ken Clark, the department’s Division 6 district engineer based in Whiteville, said in a state DOT news release.
“Replacing both bridges with a single structure will reduce maintenance costs and lower the risk of damage by future flooding,” the release said. “Because of the emergency need to replace the bridges after suffering flood damage, the Federal Highway Administration will pay 80% of the construction cost, with the NCDOT’s highway trust fund covering the rest.”
The bridge that failed — the northbound structure — was constructed in 1984. It functioned on a dent-and-column foundation system, with those tiles being about 40 to 45 foot long. The new one is built upon a drill shaft system — a 72-inch shaft in the ground out about 130 foot long, Jordan said. So the columns that you see in the ground are 72 foot in diameter and 130 foot long.
The southbound bridge, the oldest of the existing structures, was built in 1956.
The northbound bridge replaced what Jordan seemed to think was called the McGirt bridge, which was built in 1927.
Elizabethtown is located midway between Wilmington and Fayetteville in the southeastern part of the state.
