People on Dixon Mill Road will have to find a new route around the bridge for a couple of months.

Earlier this week, the Scioto County Engineer's Office received the final plans and schedule to replace the Dixon Mill Road bridge over the Little Scioto River in Harrison Township. Although they are going over the plans to make sure all the corrections were made, the schedule calls for the road to be closed and the bridge to be demolished on June 19. The completion date is Oct. 16.

“We are very excited about building this structure to replace the through-truss bridge which was built in 1946,” said Scioto County Engineer Clyde Willis.

He added the new bridge will be a spliced single-span, semi-integral precast, prestressed, post-tensioned concrete structure.

“This is a fairly new structure and as far as I know there are only two others like it in Ohio. Several have been built in the western states,” Willis said.

The contractor for the project is C.J. Mahan Construction Company of Grove City and the bridge designer is Janssen and Spaans Engineering Company of Indianapolis.

The Dixon Mill Bridge is one of three bridge projects the county engineer's office has in the works. The other two are a bridge on Arion Road over Scioto Brush Creek in Union Township and the third is raising the roadway and building a new bridge on Hayport Road over Pine Creek in Porter Township. The cost for all three projects is $5.5 million.

Willis said all three are being funded mainly by the Ohio Department of Transportation. The county will need to contribute less than 5 percent of this total cost over the next several years with their share of the project's costs coming from motor vehicle fuel tax revenue.

The Dixon Mill Road and the Arion Road bridges are being built under the state's new design-build delivery method which allows the county agency to handle the bidding, plan checking and construction under federal and state transportation agencies' guidance.

The Hayport Road project is more complex. The road is prone to flooding when Pine Creek rises and to counteract that, the roadway is going to be elevated by 60 feet and some of the curves straightened out.

Willis said just replacing the bridge without doing the road work was not good public policy. He added that after talking with an engineer from the Federal Highway Administration and explaining the importance of the road to the community and to the local economy, the FHA agreed to pick up the $2.6 million tab.

MARK SHAFFER can be reached at (740) 353-3101, ext. 235.