Countywide Trail Bridge Assessments
Benesch performed 79 initial bridge inspections for the Forest Preserve District of Kane County. The trail bridges are timber, steel or concrete and are located in the District’s linear and internal trail systems, five of which cross over roadways. The structures inspected range from simple timber stringer bridges up to complex long-span cable-stayed and arch bridges.
Inspection duties included providing detailed inspection reports with findings, recommendations, planning level cost estimates and color photographs for each structure. The elements of each structure inspected include decks, superstructures, substructures, railings, approaches and underlying channels. For the five bridges located over roadways, National Bridge Inspection Standards (NBIS) were employed during the evaluation.
Benesch developed an inspection report template tailored to the Forest Preserve District’s needs and coordinated with the Illinois Department of Transportation in requesting Structure Numbers for the five bridges over roadways, so they could be properly inventoried by the State and measured for their clearances. Because limited existing plans were available, Benesch’s inspection services required taking basic measurements of all structures to create accurate catalogs.
Finally, many of the structures are “rail-to-trail” bridges, meaning there were many cases where original timber or masonry components of old rail bridges were reused via unique retrofits in order to re-use portions of the old structures as trail bridges.
