Veterans Bridge on First Avenue South is closed and will not reopen until late August or early September.

Drivers heading west across the Kenyon Road Bridge are limited to one lane for part of the trip. But before long, both eastbound lanes of that bridge will be closed and all traffic will be shifted to the westbound side, with one lane of traffic going in each direction.

Then in 2024, the westbound portion of the Kenyon Road Bridge will be dismantled and replaced with a new one.

Veterans Bridge

-Messenger photo by Bill Shea
Scaffolding has been erected beneath the eastbound lanes of the Kenyon Road Bridge in preparation for major repair work.

Veterans Bridge closed on March 13 for a major overhaul.

The bridge carries First Avenue South over the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and is a key link between downtown and the retail area on the city’s east side.

The bridge was built in 1968. Not much work has been done on it since then, according to City Engineer Austin Morrow.

Morrow said concrete patching will be done on the bridge’s deck, which is what the vehicles drive on.

The beams, which are under the deck, will be repaired and a few of them will be replaced.

-Messenger photo by Hans Madsen
Workers from Minturn Construction work on breaking up a section of the deck on the Veterans Memorial Bridge Thursday afternoon. Work has started on the project with crews busy with demolition work to prepare for the repair work to follow.

Some concrete patching will be done on the piers, which are the big vertical columns that hold the bridge up.

Other elements of the project include:

• New curbs.

• Improved drainage.

• New street lights.

-Messenger photo by Hans Madsen
A pair of workers from Minturn Construction work on removing old concrete and rebar Thursday afternoon as work has gotten underway on the Veterans Memorial Bridge project in Fort Dodge. The project will keep the bridge portion of First Avenue South closed for several months.

• New sidewalks.

The City Council hired Minturn Inc., of Brooklyn, to do the job at a cost of $3,590,046.45.

Kenyon Road Bridge

The work now being done on the westbound lanes of the Kenyon Road Bridge just past Eighth Street consists of fixing a bump in the road caused by deteriorated concrete next to an expansion joint.

“There’s no risk to anything; it’s just that the concrete is getting bad,” Jenny Hoskins, the resident construction engineer in the Jefferson office of the Iowa Department of Transportation, previously told The Messenger.

When that work is done, Cramer and Associates, of Des Moines, the contractor hired by the state, will close both eastbound lanes of the bridge and shift traffic onto the westbound side.

Repairing beams under the eastbound lanes will be the major element of the repair project there.

Then in 2024, all traffic will be moved to the eastbound lanes while the westbound bridges are dismantled and replaced.

The Kenyon Road Bridge consists of four structures — two on the westbound side and two on the eastbound side — that carry Kenyon Road over the Canadian National Railway tracks, Pleasant Valley and the Des Moines River. The eastbound and westbound sides of the bridge are actually two different kinds of structures.

The eastbound bridges are made of concrete, while the westbound ones are steel frame bridges. The westbound bridges have a very similar design to the Interstate 35 West bridge that collapsed in the Twin Cities of Minnesota in 2007.