LONGVIEW, Wash. — The Lewis and Clark Bridge in Longview has reopened to all traffic as of 5 p.m. Thursday, the Oregon Department of Transportation announced, bringing an early end to the closure after just under four days.
ODOT closed the bridge to all vehicular traffic on Sunday evening so that crews could replace two finger joints and a fractured floor beam, with only emergency vehicles and bikes still allowed across. The closure was originally scheduled to take up to eight days.
But crews from contractor Combined Construction Inc. managed to finish all of that work over the past few days, ODOT announced on Thursday, and the Washington Department of Transportation also sent its own crews to complete deck sealing work during the downtime, which helps preserve the service life of the roadway.
The speed comes despite the fact that crews had to grapple with heavy smoke from the nearby wood chip pile fire at the nearby Nippon Dynawave property that broke out Tuesday evening.
The early reopening will come as a relief to commuters in the area, who were facing hours-long detours to get across the Columbia River on Interstate 5 in Portland, on the Astoria Bridge out at the coast or on the Wahkiakum County Ferry. The bridge carries an average of 20,000 vehicles each day, providing a critical link for industry in Longview and Rainier as well as for traffic headed to and from the coast.
The bridge had a brief unplanned shutdown earlier this year when crews doing early preparation work for the finger joint replacement project noticed the fractured floor beam, prompting an emergency overnight closure while they inspected the damage.
