A routine bridge inspection of the Interstate 55 Mississippi River Bridge will require single outside lane closures for about three weeks, causing traffic to be slightly delayed, according to the Arkansas Department of Transportation.
The inspection began Monday with the outside lane in the northbound direction being inspected first. Only one lane of traffic will be closed at a time, said the highway department.
Dave Parker, public information officer for the Arkansas Department of Transportation, said there is a full routine inspection conducted every two years for all the portions and elements of the I-55 bridge.
"They're documenting deficiencies ranging from minor cracks to looking at the reinforced concrete deck, to checking for corrosion in any of the steel structure or any of the steel portions," Parker said.
The northbound outside lane will be closed 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Thursday. The southbound outside lane will close from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. through Thursday.
"It should be noted Fridays and weekends are certainly not impacted," Parker said. "We don't in any way want to impact the summer travel. Traffic may slow down a little bit, but it's not a shut down of the bridge."
The Hernando DeSoto Bridge, which connects Arkansas and Tennessee over the Mississippi River at Memphis, shut down May 11, 2021,for three months after inspectors found a crack -- that developed before 2016 -- in a steel beam during a routine two-year inspection, according to highway department officials. Parker said the shutdown has prompted the highway department to perform a 12-month inspection called a "fracture-critical inspection" on all fracture-critical bridges.
"This is really just an in-depth, arm's length type of inspection that's done just on the non-redundant steel tension members," Parker said.
Just like the I-40 bridge, Parker said I-55 is classified as a fracture-critical bridge. That means there are five areas of the bridge that act independently and "if one of those five or any of those five areas fail, the bridge could fail."
"We're required by federal law to do an inspection every two years," Parker said. "That's what we're doing now, but we go above and beyond on the 'off years' if you will, and we do that fracture critical portion. So, it's inspected every year, it's just a different type of inspection."