Anchorage Daily News

It's not a thing of beauty, but there's a certain retro-industrial charm to the rusting old bridge over Peters Creek on the Old Glenn Highway.

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Anyone want it?

"Forget for sale. We'll give it to you," said Jim Amundsen, a project manager in highway design at the state Department of Transportation.

It's free, sort of. If you promise to haul off and take good care of this piece of old Alaska, the state will pay you $50,000 toward the effort, he said. The real cost of moving it, and maintaining its integrity, will be far more, Amundsen readily acknowledged.

The Peters Creek bridge is 100 feet long, 27 feet wide. Without the asphalt deck, the bridge weighs about 50 tons. With the decking, it's triple that -- about 300,000 pounds. It probably has remnants of old lead paint the new owner would have to deal with. And then there's the rusting trusses.

The bridge is a prefab deal built in 1950, the bridge version of a mobile home shipped up in parts and then assembled on site, Amundsen said. A Seattle ironworks company manufactured it.

"I always thought it looked like an Erector Set," Amundsen said, referring to a toy popular when he was a kid. "This is kind of the same effect."

It's historic because of its age -- in Alaska, 59-year-old things can be "historic" -- and its importance as a traffic route, DOT officials said. They think it will be eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, if someone wants to do that.

For a quarter century, anyone headed north out of Anchorage, or back into the city, had to cross the narrow steel truss bridge. This stretch of the Old Glenn was the lone route to the Mat-Su and the only way Outside until 1976, said Rick Feller, a DOT spokesman.

The DOT refused to release a report on the bridge's historical or cultural significance because, he said, in some situations historical information could attract looters, even though that doesn't seem to apply here.

While the bridge on the Old Glenn doesn't get nearly the traffic of the new Glenn, a steady stream of people still rely on it. State counts put it at 3,500 vehicles a day, Amundsen said.

The bridge doesn't look rickety, despite the many patches of rust. Cars and trucks and a People Mover bus painted with whales went over in the space of minutes Tuesday. Most made a loud clunkedy-clunk sound. Below, the fierce-looking creek roared over boulders.

Under the bridge, it looks like a teen party spot. "Virgen eyes," someone wrote, not caring about the misspelling. There were peace signs and several graffiti references to "skaters."

The bridge's design is what engineers call "fracture critical," meaning if a key support is knocked out, the whole thing could fall down, said Rich Pratt, DOT's chief bridge engineer. Some 60 Alaska bridges are in that category, he said. Like the steel truss highway bridge that collapsed a couple of years ago during rush hour in Minneapolis. A concrete girder bridge, in contrast, has built-in redundancies, Pratt said, or features that back each other up,

When a fracture critical bridge deteriorates, it's of special concern, he said.

"All it takes is one vehicle to hit the wrong upright member and all of a sudden the whole thing is in the creek," Amundsen said.

The bridge is categorized as structurally deficient because of the rust eating away at the steel, Pratt said. An inspector last rated the trusses a "4," for poor, on a nine-point scale, he said.

About 20 percent of Alaska's 1,000 or so state-inspected bridges are structurally deficient, which doesn't mean that failure is imminent, only that they are in poor enough shape to qualify for federal money to repair or replace them, Pratt said.

The state is using federal economic stimulus dollars to replace the Peters Creek bridge as part of a $20 million project that also includes redoing a 4.1-mile stretch of the old Glenn, from the S. Birchwood Loop exit to Ski Road, Amundsen said. There will be a wider shoulder, a passing lane and a pathway along the length of it. The price tag includes the cost of demolishing the old bridge and building a new concrete girder bridge.

Because of the rust issue, the old bridge could most easily be reused as a pedestrian overpass, because there wouldn't be worries about vehicle load. Maybe it will end up in a park, Amundsen said.

"It has to be agencies or groups that legitimately have the ability to take care of it and otherwise retain its cultural and historical appearance and reasonable use," he said.

Construction for the road project should start next spring. For about six weeks next summer, the road will close at the bridge while the new one is built, Amundsen said.

"It's now time to replace it," he said. "It's getting old and rusty and tired. It just isn't capable of handling the modern traffic loads."

But everyone agrees the chances are slim that someone will accept this 150-ton gift from the state. More likely, the old bridge will be torn down. The contractor can sell the steel for scrap. The rubble could end up as part of the new road.

Find Lisa Demer online at adn.com/contact/ldemer or call 257-4390.

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