Situated atop a spillway dam that forms Lake Pickett and discharges into the Nottoway River, the existing 430-foot-long Route 46 bridge required evaluation and replacement.
As the dam, lake, and adjacent property were owned by the U.S. Department of Defense through Fort Pickett, layers of coordination and regulatory complexity were present for this project. During Phase 1, KCI evaluated multiple options for rehabilitating or replacing the structure by performing structural integrity assessments and life cycle cost analyses. Concrete repairs were made to portions of the spillway and bridge substructure to provide an expected service life of over 50 years for the bridge rehabilitation. Additionally, our team considered constructability challenges in our design associated with the bridge over the spillway and reservoir that serves as drinking water source for the town of Blackstone.
In Phase 2, the selected solution involved replacing the bridge’s superstructure with a continuous unit of weathering steel rolled beams topped with a cast-in-place deck. Working in collaboration with the Virginia Transportation Research Council, our team implemented a corrosion-resistant steel substructure design tailored to the site’s environmental conditions, helping to ensure long-term durability and performance. Pre-fabricated steel substructure elements were designed and detailed to accelerate bridge construction time and allow the contractor schedule flexibility on when the substructure construction could be completed.
