Ready for Occupancy

CELINA - Equipment and materials are being moved into a new $1.44 million, 80-by-160-foot building at the Mercer County Engineer's office.

Work recently wrapped up on the pre-engineered metal building where the county's bridge crew will base their bridge and culvert operations and store bridge beams, equipment and other materials.

The building is located just east of three others that comprise the engineer's office complex at 4884 Mud Pike. The office self-financed the project with road and bridge funds generated from gas tax and license fees.

"The biggest part of this improvement will be the bridge side of this," county engineer Jim Wiechart said. "We have a small but mighty three-man bridge crew and a lot of operations and activities will be out of this area."

Other engineer's office employees will use the work area as well, he said.

The interior is roughly 12,800 square feet, project engineer Eric Schmiesing of Garman/Miller previously said. An 8,000-square-feet covered exterior area open on three sides provides more storage.

Since the 1970s, the engineer's office has maintained a fenced-in building at the county fairgrounds where personnel have cast and stored short beams for bridge replacements. The office has since outgrown the facility.

According to an agreement signed decades ago, the area was to revert to the county fairgrounds when the engineer's office left, according to Wiechart.

"There's an important advantage … it's here, where the bulk of everybody is," Wiechart said during a tour of the new facility. "The second advantage is we get out of the fairgrounds so they can do their thing with whatever they want to do with that building over there. In the long term that's an advantage for each of these parties."

Engineer officials are still mulling whether to install new casting beds inside or outside the new facility. Employees on average cast about 20 short beams as long as 40 feet each year. The beams are used in bridge replacement and repair projects and it's more economical to do so in-house.

"If we do, then we'll do our bridge casting in here," he said. "At the fairgrounds we did all the bridge beam casting on the exterior of the building. So there's some old casting beds. They were starting to really get in bad shape. They were about getting to the point that we really didn't want to cast beams out of them because they had so much use."

Looking ahead to the next few years, there are no projects requiring beams beyond 40 feet long so officials have time to decide whether to place new casting beds inside the building.

"Our limit on these type of conventionally reinforced beams is 40 feet," he said. "Once you hit that 40-plus threshold, then you really can't cast them yourself. So then you've got to go to what's known as pre-stressing and that's a whole different world of (complex and hazardous) pre-casting."

As such, there's no pressing need to get all the equipment and materials moved into the new facility, especially as ongoing unseasonably warm weather has allowed the three-man bridge crew to work on road or bridge projects and dig into the unfrozen ground, said operations manager Brad Laffin.

"There's no real rush," Laffin said. "If the guys can still be getting productive work done out in the field, that's where we would rather have them. On really off-days, foul weather days ... then they'll continue to move stuff over."

The covered exterior area provides room for items such as orange cones, bridge barricades, road closed signs and other items that are relatively impervious to the elements. This frees up interior space for costly vehicles and equipment, Laffin said.

"We're hoping to be able to have everything powered or with an engine at lest under roof," he said, adding that some trailers likely will have to be parked outside."Some of the newer equipment we have - whether it's a tractor or a dump truck - with so much of the computerized technology that drives those in a sense, we want to be able to get that sort of stuff put inside enclosed buildings."

The exterior storage area is designed for personnel to quickly drive up their vehicles, load up what they need and get back out to work, boosting efficiency during weather events such as flooding.

Wiechart recently offered an overview of bridge work planned for 2022. His office is responsible for maintaining 385 miles of county roadways and 381 bridges.

A portion of Watkins road from Burkettsville-St. Henry Road to State Route 118 is scheduled for improvement. This includes two bridge replacements estimated to bid out at about $1.3 million, he said, adding that $440,000 of the project would be paid for with federal funds.

A similar project is expected to be completed on Hellwarth Road from State Route 29 to Mud Pike at an estimated cost of $400,000, Wiechart said. Roughly 80% of the cost will be paid with federal funds, he said.

Several bridges have been selected for repair or replacement in 2022. The Wabash Road bridge in Washington Township will be replaced at an estimated cost of $800,000, 95% of which would be covered by federal funds, Wiechart said.

Other bridges slated for work include those on St. Anthony and Rauh roads in Washington Township, the Huwer Road bridge in Marion Township, the Miller and Herman roads bridges in Hopewell Township, the Burkettsville-St. Henry Road bridge in Granville Township and the Shelley Road bridge in Union Township.

"Wabash is the largest size structure of this group and we are using grant funds to replace it," he said. ""The rest of the bridges on this list are smaller and are of more modest cost."