Engineers presented plans Thursday, April 3, for three new bridges in the town of Dayton.
Two bridges will be located on West Road, one over Emmons Creek and the other over Radley Creek.
The third bridge will be on Dayton Road over Radley Creek.
Total cost for the three bridges is estimated at $865,000, according to AECOM, the engineering firm designing the project.
Dayton’s new bridges will be wider in order to comply with state regulations.
They will all be single-span concrete bridges with full retaining abutments.
The West Road bridge at Radley Creek will have a 24-foot clear roadway width, which is nine feet wider than the existing structure.
The current bridge is 19.5 feet long. The new structure will be 26.5 feet wide with a 24-foot span.
The Dayton Road bridge over Radley Creek will be six feet wider than the existing 18-foot wide structure. It will be 30.5 feet wide.
The West Road bridge over Emmons Creek will also be about 30.5 feet long, which is more than twice the length of the existing bridge. It will also be nearly 10 feet wider than the existing 14.5-foot wide bridge.
Beth Nemec, an engineer with AECOM, said construction will take about two months. The bridges will be closed and traffic rerouted during construction in the summer of 2015.
Although data indicates that all three bridges have traffic counts ranging from 120 to 190 vehicles per day, the narrow widths make it impossible for farmers to drive their equipment across the bridges.
The proposed bridges are likely to have solid concrete barriers rather than metal railing.
Metal railings allow winter road salt to go directly into the streams below.
Salted ice that melts off a bridge with concrete barriers will flow along the length of the bridge and to the banks where vegetation acts as a buffer to protect the stream.