Washington Avenue Bridge Replacement Set for 2025

It’s almost time to pay the piper on Washington Avenue in Wheeling.

But that was expected, according to City Manager Bob Herron, since the replacement of the Washington Avenue Bridge was delayed with $400,000 worth in emergency repairs in early 2022. The traffic situation in the city would have been far worse if the Washington Avenue Bridge had been replaced while Swank Construction crews continued working on rehabilitation projects along Interstate 70 in Ohio County.

“The Washington Avenue Bridge will be coming down at some point in 2025, and that project will be conducted by the Division of Highways and will require a closure for a period of time,” Herron explained. “It involves removing the bridge that’s there now, and replacing it completely, and we’re hoping that it will take less than a year. But ultimately, that’s up to DOH officials and the contractor.”

According to Herron, the exact timing of the project has not been established, but the expense has been projected.

“The last figure I saw as far as the cost for that project was about $8-9 million,” he said. “I know the DOH will do everything they can to minimize the closure time, and this project may allow for some of the structure to be constructed offsite and brought in for placement. If that’s the case, it will minimize the closure period.”

Washington Avenue connects National Road to Mount de Chantal Road, a two-lane street that leads to interstate access, Wheeling Hospital, and the Clator and Morningside neighborhoods. National Road, of course, splits most of the city of Wheeling, beginning in Elm Grove and ending at the foot of the shuttered Suspension Bridge in downtown.

“Our local residents will figure out the detours that fit them best, and we’ll have plenty of signage for everyone else to follow,” Herron said. “It was closed when the repairs were made a couple of years ago, so our residents have been through it before.

“Because of where the bridge is located, people will have to go to the Springdale area or to the Perkins area to access Interstate 70, and that will be that additional traffic on National Road,” the city manager said. “People will figure it out like they did the last time.”

Failure Doesn’t Mean Collapse

The Washington Avenue Bridge is a cantilever span that was built using structures that project horizontally into space, supported on only one end by a cantilever.

So, the bridge could have “failed” if the repairs were not made, but that would entail only a small fall of sorts.

“It’s floats,” Herron explained. “Some of the attachments that allow it to float were really rusted when the state inspection took place back in back in early 2021. That means there could have been a failure, but that doesn’t mean it would collapsed into the creek. If the bridge did fail, it would have dropped about 6 inches and rested on one of the supports.

“But we didn’t want that to happen, obviously, so we made the repairs because we didn’t want the project to take place while the I-70 projects were going on,” he added. “We wanted to push it back and take a lot of pressure off a lot of people, and we accomplished that knowing the replacement was going to eventually happen.”

The city manager reported the Shilling Bridge would be the next bridge project, but he offered no timetable for its replacement.

“The Shilling Bridge took on a lot of additional traffic during the I-70 projects and when the Monument Bridge was closed this past year,” Herron said. “It’s next on the list and it will be addressed at some point soon, and we have another bridge in our industrial park that will need to be replaced in the near future, too.

“We’ve seen a lot of improvements with our roads and bridges over the past five years, but the I-70 improvements are great, Monument Bridge looks great, and we’re about a year away from the completion of the streetscape in downtown,” he said. “Our roads and bridges are looking better than they have for a lot of years.”