Broward and Palm Beach County bridges should be replaced: county officials

A Broward County bridge
A Broward County bridge

A number of Broward and Palm Beach County bridges need to be replaced — and the county is unlikely to able to afford to replace them in a timely fashion, the Sun Sentinel reported. Officials say the bridges are not in danger of collapsing, but that the costs of repairing them are augmenting, and replacing the bridges makes more sense than allowing repair costs to pile up.

“When they get older, we have to pay more attention to them,” Anh Ton, Broward County’s director of highway and bridge maintenance, told the Sun Sentinel. “We do have to spend more time to maintain them. There’s a lot more wear and tear on them.”

Broward County has listed 14 bridges as “structurally deficient,” according to the Sun Sentinel. There are 104 bridges in the county that are listed as “functionally obsolete” or don’t meet current traffic standards.

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Palm Beach County has 79 bridges listed as “obsolete” by the county, of which 26 are 50 years old or older, the Sun Sentinel said. The county has only four bridges with structural problems, and three of those are being replaced.

The cost of repairing a drawbridge can be anywhere from $30 million to $90 million, the paper said. [Sun Sentinel]Guelda Voien