Bridge in CO closes resulting in 6-7 hour detour

[pixy0stix]

coloradosun.com/2024/04/20/us-50-bridge-closure-blue-mesa-montrose-gunnison/

The bridge has been closed to all traffic since Thursday evening, after an inspection of the bridge at Dillon Pinnacles revealed a 3-inch crack in structural steel. The unexpected shutdown has left people stranded on either side of the closure and facing six to seven hours of driving over precarious mountain passes to reach home — a journey that typically takes an hour.

[livinitup]

I’ve seen some pretty bad highway delays in person, too. Like, I drove over the local bridge going over the interstate and people were pulled over, pointing and taking photos of the flipped truck and miles of back-up. Reports had it at 6-7 hours, too.

I just washed and returned my emergency blanket to my trunk. I really need to re-supply with water and granola bars, too. These stories always remind me to be a little more vigilant.

I hope I never need it.

[aurora]

Colorado has its share of long delays, too, but in this case it isn't just a delay that will get managed in the coming days, it's a bridge closure where the alternatives are a 6-hr or 7-hr drive around via totally different parts of the state.

Or I suppose a boat ride across the reservoir, if you have a car available on either side.

The situation will last until the bridge is fixed, or until the snow melts in the mountains (could be into July) and only then if the state is then able to sufficiently improve a back dirt road.

[mrspez07]

My brother has property (he uses it mostly in the summer but there are many year-round residents) on the south side of the bridge and lives in Denver metro. He won’t be visiting anytime soon. He’s in various local neighborhood groups up there and this has everyone scrambling, from grocery delivery semis, people who need meds, to ambulance and police services having to create an agreement with an adjacent county. Any of the “local” routes they are working to “improve” (gravel, not paved) will only be able to accommodate passenger vehicles, not delivery, not commercial and not RVs. The community is coming together to come up with solutions but it’s also a very red part of CO, which I find ironic.
This will decimate the tourism in the area as well.
The day they shut the bridge down, there were kids in school in Gunnison and had to be shuttled by boat to get home.
The bridge is in a reservoir, and was built in the 1960s.. This is not going to be an easy fix. You can’t just rebuild a bridge like this overnight.

ETA: detours that are 6-7 hours are for Gunnison to say Cimmeron or Montrose, which typically take 1-1.5 hours. Doing the route starting in Denver adds only about 1-1.5 hours, Gunnison and Crested Butte are now at a very long dead end.

[jlt19]

Yikes, that’s alarming!

I remember my first real boss told me that there was only one route out of St. Louis that didn’t cross a river (and subsequently asked me what it was). I didn’t know and he showed me on a big map of the city. It really made me think about what would happen if there was some sort of emergency and the entire area had to evacuate.

About a year later I moved to the other side of one of those rivers. Now I wonder if I subconsciously did that for a reason…

[heygrey]

We have areas of British Columbia that are similarly precarious without viable alternate routes. In late August there was a rock slide that closed the major highway thought our region. Any detours on actual roads were a 4 hour minimum. They were able to make some logging roads passable for trucks and large SUVs, but a normal sedan could not navigate them, nor were they adequate for transport trucks. It lasted well into the start of the school year which was a nightmare for students and staff on the opposite side of the closure. Lots of employers were asking their employees to travel on the weekend and putting them up in hotels during the week. It meant shipping companies had to change their origination points and there was week or so of limited groceries while stores figured out how to reroute their trucks.

When I try to explain this to my family back east they have no concept of how limited our infrastructure is. Between mountains and large bodies of water there aren't a lot of easy options to build more roads in the west.

[kath16]

Apr 22, 2024 19:59:01 GMT -5 jlt19 said:

Yikes, that’s alarming!

I remember my first real boss told me that there was only one route out of St. Louis that didn’t cross a river (and subsequently asked me what it was). I didn’t know and he showed me on a big map of the city. It really made me think about what would happen if there was some sort of emergency and the entire area had to evacuate.

About a year later I moved to the other side of one of those rivers. Now I wonder if I subconsciously did that for a reason…

i consciously did not even entertain the idea of living across the river from where my kids go to school