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Act on Bellaire Bridge This Year

The year may be new but some things never change. The old Bellaire Bridge is among them. Long after the span was closed to traffic, it remains standing as a monument to government’s seeming inability to solve a serious problem.

But the bridge itself did change during the past 12 months. Wind, rain, snow and ice along with winter cold and summer heat combined with time itself to take a toll on the bridge. Little by little, it continues to rust and deteriorate in other ways.

Pieces of the structure continue to drop off. At some point, a major section of the bridge could collapse, either into the Ohio River or down onto Benwood. The potential for that happening grows with every month the span remains standing.

It is not that Benwood officials have not worked hard to get the bridge demolished. They have tried virtually every trick in the proverbial book.

But despite their best efforts, the outlook for removal of the bridge is no better than it was a year – or even a decade – ago.

As we have reported, the structure is privately owned, tied up in various lawsuits and bankruptcy proceedings. It appears the amounts of money involved may exceed the salvage value of steel in the bridge.

At some point, the bridge simply must be demolished, or a catastrophe could occur. Again, the old span can resist gravity successfully for only so long.

Benwood officials have exhausted their resources in dealing with the problem. Because the bridge crosses a navigable waterway, that drops the ball squarely into the federal government’s court.

Federal officials seem to be able to find money for hundreds, if not thousands, of questionable expenditures. Billions of dollars are wasted and/or used for absurd purposes every year. At some point, someone in Washington needs to decide preventing a Bellaire Bridge disaster is as important as, say, spending $545,000 to teach people how to answer questions at congressional hearings, paying an author to write a book about tobacco use in Russia or coughing up nearly $43 million for a natural gas compressing station in Afghanistan that was used for only about a year.

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