Shortly after the I-35W bridge disaster, an effort was made to inspect all truss bridges in the State of Minnesota. This project was undertaken just to make sure that nothing significant had been missed in previous inspections. When the county highway engineer from Lac Qui Parle County inspected this bridge, he found a serious structural problem with the floorbeams. The bridge was posted with very strict 10 ton weight limit on October, 24, 2007. That would buy time to make a decision on the future of the structure.

After further review, it looks like yet another truss bridge will bite the dust. The steel was too far gone to save, so the bridge will be removed and replaced. In these photos, we see that most of the bridge has been removed as of June, 2008. The parts remaining are the truss steel and the two river channel piers. Bridge #5890 will be completely gone by the end of June, 2008.

The new bridge will be bridge #37552. While I have not found difinitive specs on the new bridge, it appears that it will be 143 feet long and 35 feet wide. Duininck Brothers, Inc, was the low bidder on the project. They bid $22,000 to remove the old bridge, and $498,530 to build the new bridge. This was about 13% higher than the construction estimate that was prepared by the design engineer.

The final photo below, taken in July of 2008, shows the steel truss has been removed, and work has started on building a pier for the new bridge in the center of the river channel.