Upper Milford Bridges Achieve Failing Marks on State Report Card

Report cards came out for our nation’s bridges earlier this month, and Upper Milford Township's bridges, for the most part, received failing grades. The township is in good company, however, as the state of Pennsylvania also falls at the bottom of the class nationally as far as its bridges are concerned.

According to a report recently released by Transportation for America, Pennsylvania has the largest number of deficient bridges of any state in the country. More than 25 percent of the bridges in Pennsylvania need significant maintenance, repair or replacement, the report says.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation rates a bridge as structurally deficient and gives it a numerical score from one to 100, with one being those bridges in the poorest condition. Transportation for America takes those scores and uses the data to rank the state in its report.

Bridges in Emmaus/Upper Milford Township get mixed evaluations with seven of the 17 state-owned bridges in our area blowing the curve by garnering a sufficiency rating of better than 85 out of 100. Four of the 17 state-owned bridges are “structurally deficient” and one of those four is also deemed “functionally obsolete.” 

An assessment of structurally deficient means that one or more of the bridge’s major components has deteriorated. Functionally obsolete means a bridge had older features when compared to more recently built bridges.

All of the structurally deficient state-owned bridges are in Upper Milford Township. 

Also in Upper Milford, two of the locally owned bridges scored so low that they may qualify for federal funds for replacement. A third Upper Milford bridge received a score low enough to potentially enable it to qualify for funds to rehab or refurbish it. According to the PennDot Web site, sufficiency scores below 49 may qualify for replacement funds. Those in the 50 - 79 range may qualify for funds for repair.

There are three locally owned bridges that are currently considered structurally deficient and all three have posted weight restrictions:

• Yeakels Mill Road bridge, which crosses Perkiomen Creek, built in 1960, with a sufficiency rating of 29.5
• Toll Gate Road bridge, which crosses Indian Creek, built in 1919, with a sufficiency rating of 50.5
• Sigmund Road bridge, which crosses Perkiomen Creek, built in 1950, with a sufficiency rating of 30.1

According to Dan DeLong, Upper Milford Township Manager, the Upper Milford Township Board of Supervisors will be discussing the next steps on the Yeakels Mill Road bridge at its meeting on Thursday night.

DeLong had invited six companies in December to submit proposals for engineering services related to the restoration of the bridge. Four responded, including the lowest proposal of $24,500 from Rettew Associates and the highest proposal of $119,510 from T & M Associates of Bethlehem.

DeLong says the township has received two estimates from Rettew Associates of Allentown – one to undergo a deck repair on the bridge and the other for a deck replacement and the board will be reviewing these on Thursday.

“We decided that before we went ahead throwing money down a black hole we would ask them to go into more detail on how it would be repaired,” he says.

DeLong says that the township has done some remedial work on the both the Toll Gate Road and Sigmund Road bridges and that both are “posted. They can’t handle large trucks. But Yeakels Mill is the one that really needs attention.”

The state-owned bridges in that are structurally deficient are all in Upper Milford Township. They are located:

• Route 29 north (.4 miles south of Powder Valley Road), which crosses Indian Creek, built in 1926, with a sufficiency rating of 47
• Indian Creek Road, which crosses Indian Creek, built in 1973, with a sufficiency rating of 61
• Vera Cruz Road (south on Vera Cruz Road, .1 miles north of Zionsville), which crosses a branch of the Hosensack Creek, built in 1938, with a sufficiency rating of 69.8
• Route 29 (.2 miles south of the Pennsylvania Turnpike), which crosses the Norfolk/Southern Railroad line, built in 1927, with a sufficiency rating of 34

PennDOT conducts about 19,000 bridge safety inspections each year, and it is responsible for inspecting about 25,000 state-owned highway bridges at least once every two years, according to its web site. Those with weight restrictions are inspected once a year. 

PennDOT also oversees the inspection by municipalities and other agencies of about 7,000 locally owned bridges once every two years.

Nevada is the nation’s valedictorian as far as bridges are concerned, with only 2.2 percent of the states bridges being termed structurally deficient, according to the Transportation for America report.

There are a total of 21 bridges in Emmaus/Upper Milford Township.

You can search bridges by zip code on Transportation for America's Web site.