Monday, November 14, 2011

Utah's Bridges: Hatch Canyon Wash Bridge

May 2006 (38.201 Degrees, -109.375 Degrees) Hatch Canyon Wash Bridge
A few miles south of Blanding, SR-95 turned into US-191, and I began riding north towards Moab. Unlike the segment from Hite to Blanding, the ride from Blanding to Moab was mostly downhill, which was very welcome. I wonder if the ride would have been less exhausting if I had ridden clockwise instead of counterclockwise around southeast Utah?

Although the landscape continued to be spectacular, the bridges along this part of my ride were mostly ordinary steel girder spans. There is a very nice three span steel pedestrian truss bridge in Moab that carries hikers and mountain bikers to some of the canyon trails, but I didn't get a chance to photograph it.

Anyway, halfway between Blanding and Moab is a one span bridge over Hatch Canyon Wash. It is a 127 ft long steel girder bridge that was built in 1956. The bridge carries 3770 vehicles a day and has a Sufficiency Rating of 0.50. The Federal Highway Administration went through a major effort to identify scour critical bridges, including this structure. Considering the relatively large daily traffic, I wouldn't be surprised if this vulnerable structure wasn't replaced (at a cost of $723,000).
Creative Commons License
Utah's Bridges: Hatch Canyon Wash Bridge by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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