ROSSFORD, Ohio — It was just over one year ago when an oversized semitrailer damaged the Lime City Road bridge over I-75 in Rossford.
Now work is finally beginning to not only repair the bridge but hopefully prevent it from happening again.
If you are one of the hundreds of people who regularly take Lime City Road, you have been dealing with temporary signals and lane closures on this bridge for a year. But the Ohio Department of Transportation is now ready to begin the construction to fix it for good.
For the last 12 months, drivers on Lime City Road have had to wait for the one lane of traffic to clear before crossing the overpass bridge.
ODOT project engineer Kyle Ruedel said the team wanted to get this repair work done as fast as possible, so the department offered a design/build contract last fall for just over $7.2 million.
Both the design and the construction contractors have worked together to get the planning for this complicated work ready.
The project is also expected to go faster than a traditional new build as most of the existing infrastructure is usable.
"So it definitely allows a lot of advance work before we do the full closure, and it minimizes the amount of work that occurs during that closure," Ruedel said.
For the next few months, the work may occasionally close one lane of traffic on I-75.
Then in June, the entire bridge will be closed to through traffic for about 120 days, and the entire bridge span will be raised, the damaged steel beams will be repaired, and two additional beams will be added to open space for a 10-foot wide multi-use path.
"The deck is coming off of the existing structure," Ruedel said. "We're going to reuse the existing beams, repair the damaged beam and then add two additional beamlines there to the south end for the widened pedestrian path."
The intention is to have as much of the physical structure complete and the bridge reopened to traffic in the fall.
"The structure will be back open, and then in the spring we will also have structure painting, and steel painting to finish out next spring," Ruedel said.
The walking path segment will not be open to pedestrians until the larger multi-use path is developed to connect with the bridge in the near future.
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