Nevada’s bridges remain strong, but upgrades face $133M shortfall

The majority of Nevada’s bridges are in good to fair condition, but the state faces a $133 million shortfall to upgrade a handful of spans, officials said this week.

Of the 2,008 bridges maintained or receiving assistance from the Nevada Department of Transportation, only 31 are considered to be in poor condition, said Reid Kaiser, NDOT’s assistant operations director.

“They’re still in good shape,” Kaiser told NDOT’s board of directors on Monday. “There’s just something that we could do to make them perfect.”

Federal laws require all structures to undergo assessments at least once every two years, leading to $17 million in repairs for 27 bridges across Nevada in 2015 and 2016, NDOT officials said.

That inspection data is used to determine a span’s durability, in which age often plays a factor.

Some of the state’s bridges in Nevada that were built from the 1950s through the 1970s may need some corrective maintenance that would help bring them up to code, including new decks or rails or a seismic retrofit to make them able to withstand a strong earthquake, Reid said. Other times, older bridges might be too narrow to handle current traffic and thus need modification.

“It doesn’t mean a bridge is about to fail,” Gov. Brian Sandoval said.

Separately, Nevada has a $450.2 million backlog of work to improve state-owned streets and highways, with 97.9 percent of those underfunded repairs focused on rural and low-volume roads maintained by NDOT, Reid said.

The backlog is down from the $666 million reported last year, and the focus is on fixing rural roads, Reid told the NDOT board. Over the past two years, NDOT spent $186.6 million to repair 450 miles of state-owned streets and freeways.

Some of the major improvements planned this year include an $11 million project on U.S. Highway 93 near the Apex Industrial Park in North Las Vegas and a $4.6 million upgrade along Charleston Boulevard in Las Vegas.

In rural and sparsely populated areas of Nevada, NDOT officials are planning a $20 million project on U.S. Highway 95 near the state line with California; a $14.6 million improvement of U.S. Highway 6 near Ely in White Pine County; and a $9 million upgrade for U.S. 93 just south of Wells in Elko County.

Contact Art Marroquin at amarroquin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0336. Follow @AMarroquin_LV on Twitter.