The U.S. 63 bridge over the Spring River east of Ravenden in Northeast Arkansas closed Tuesday for emergency repairs after a routine inspection found structural damage.
The Arkansas Department of Transportation closed the Lawrence County span early Tuesday afternoon and expected to reopen it to one lane of traffic Tuesday night, department spokesman Dave Parker said.
The 528-foot bridge is on a major east-west artery across north Arkansas and carries 6,800 vehicles daily, 22% of which are trucks, according to the Transportation Department.
Parker said the bridge has redundancies in its design and construction, meaning it is capable of supporting a load even if it is damaged or there is a failure in one of its systems.
The bridge is a "pin and hanger" design, and the inspection revealed a broken pin and a nearly broken hanger, Parker said. Each pin and hanger assembly holds two beams together, and the bridge near Ravenden has four beams.
Arkansas Department of Transportation District 10 in Jonesboro is responsible for repairing the bridge.
Closure of the U.S. 63 span immediately raised questions about the timing of the inspection that found the damage. It came exactly two weeks after a fracture was discovered in the Interstate 40 bridge over the Mississippi River that connects Arkansas and Tennessee.
However, Parker said the U.S. 63 examination was a routine inspection -- not part of sweeping assessments being conducted by the Transportation Department after it failed in at least two consecutive annual inspections to catch the growing crack in the I-40 Hernando de Soto bridge.
The I-40 Mississippi River crossing has been closed since May 11, and officials have declined to provide a concrete timeline for when it will reopen.
Motorists have been urged to use the Interstate 55 bridge, just south of the I-40 span, as an alternate route into Memphis. The next-closest river crossing is about 75 miles south on U.S. 49 in Helena-West Helena.
The Transportation Department last week fired the leader of the inspection team responsible for reviewing the I-40, saying he and the other inspectors failed to properly examine the steel support beam that has fractured.
That inspector oversaw the inspections of nine other "fracture critical" bridges in Arkansas, and the department pledged to reinspect all of those bridges.
The U.S. 63 bridge was not one of those nine, Parker said Tuesday.
Information for this article was contributed by Noel Oman of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.