Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Property Projects & Construction anyone ever built a bridge?

Hi all,
Need to build an approx. 80 ft creek crossing. We current drive across it-it's shallow, limestone bottom, and we've had concrete mixers, pick-ups and semis drive across it no problem. But the decline/incline are a little steep for a minivan/regular car--we always scrape the front briefly on the gravel. Water runs 2-4 inches deep year-around. When it thunderstorms (southern Oklahoma) it'll rarely get 3-6 feet deep roaring rapids for about an hour, then go back down to a quiet couple of inches. Just need some help getting started: hire an engineer? call a bridge company? local construction company? Any suggestions? Thanks!

80’ bridge is bordering on some serious money.

Just throwing this out there but have you ever considered having a dozer cut the banks down for a more gradual approach?

Do a google search on railroad flat car bridge. People sell the bottom deck/frame from old railroad boxcars and flat cars to be used as bridges. 80 foot is a serious span.

Same here I have an old round railway car as a tin horn. You could use several if needed. If you need an 80 span bridge that is serious money. Probably buy another place for less cost.

One other possibility that has not been mentioned, is using old 1000 gallon anhydrous tanks (like farmers pull behind fertilizer applicators) as culverts. These tanks have to be hydrostatically tested every so many years and as lots of 1000 gallon tanks are getting old they are failing the test (most new replacements are 1500 or 2000 gallon tanks). Welding shops cut the end caps off and sell them for big culverts.

Put two or three of these down, concrete around them, and make a "low water bridge". During normal water flow the water flows through the culverts but in the occasional heavy rain it might flow both throuh and over for a few hours.

Still would not be cheap, but our local counties had some of this type bridge on low use roads for years.

Could do the same thing with regular culverts too. You have to do the job well enouh so they do not wash out.

For our farm crossings where we take tractors across creeks, we just put down appropriate size rock and make a gravel crossing. Need very large rocks down stream side to hold the rest, then build up with first large rocks then progressively smaller.

I would do a low water crossing with culverts and concrete. There are a lot of example of them in timber areas around you.

2nd that, most people around here do the same - buy old tankers and use them as culverts. The county even buys old rail tankers to form minimum maintenance road crossing culverts.

We put in a much smaller 30' or so bridge using prestressed steel beams and then covered it with pressure treated wood. The key was to place it on a type of a floating platform with mounting anchor plates in each corner. The plates had holes in the center and there was a deep seated rod embedded into the ground as part of the anchor plate system. This allowed the whole bridge to "lift or float as the water rise when the adjacent river flooded. That was the the good part. The bad part is that such flexibility wasn't cheap. I can't image what something 2 1/2 bigger than ours cost. Well actually I can, probable 1 1/2 times more!

Mr. Don
Cleveland, OH

Without seeing the property, this would get my vote. Blocking a naturally occurring creek can be dangerous, so I personally wouldn't go that route unless it was looked at by an engineer first.