Worsham St. Bridge: going, going, gone

The Worsham Street Bridge has been dying a slow death for decades. This weekend, more pieces of the 1928 bridge were pushed into the grave.

River Street has been closed to traffic this weekend so that more sections of the Worsham Street Bridge could be torn down. The demolition project has been decades in the making.

Just 21 years after the Worsham Street Bridge was opened to traffic, Dan River Mills complained to the city about a piece of the bridge’s concrete railing falling onto a proposed parking lot area.

Decades later, when Danville City Council received engineering reports about the bridge’s porous concrete that was never properly cured, resulting in rot from within and cracks too numerous to measure, that 1949 letter made a lot more sense.

Danville’s motorists have lived without the Worsham Street Bridge since July 14, 2004, when former City Manager Jerry Gwaltney ordered the bridge barricaded for safety reasons. It took the city and the state another five years to get to the actual demolition.

At the time Gwaltney closed the Worsham Street Bridge, it had a 5-ton weight limit, meaning it couldn’t support a vehicle that weighed more the 10,000 pounds. Even the Robertson Bridge, which was built in 1940, doesn’t have a weight limit.

Once the King Memorial Bridge opened at Main Street, downtown motorists had all the bridge they needed to carry them over the Dan River.

It was time for the Worsham Street Bridge to come down.

What lessons can be learned from the long fight over the Worsham Street Bridge? Clearly, infrastructure matters, even to cities like Danville that have limited resources. Bridges are important here because we are a river city. We simply can’t afford to make mistakes, miss opportunities or not take care of the structures that make life and commerce in our city possible.

At the same time, we have to be willing to cut our losses when it’s obvious that repairs — and available money — will only go so far. For enough money, anything can be done. But lacking an endless supply of money, smart choices about infrastructure have to be made.

This year, work will start on two big local transportation projects — the new Robertson Bridge and the Franklin Turnpike Connector. Both will serve different parts of the community that have needed the infrastructure to catch up with their traffic counts.

Both are important to the community’s future — just like the bridge demolition project taking place on River Street.