Residents Seek Help After Bridge Damage

By Meghan Louttit (Contact)

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Residents of Crooked Bridge Lane still don’t know whether the wooden bridge severely damaged during last week’s flooding, cutting off their access to the rest of Loudoun County, will ever be fixed.

But county officials are working on a solution.

Loudoun supervisors will vote Tuesday on whether to confirm County Administrator Kirby M. Bowers’s declaration of a local emergency. If they approve the measure, the county will be able to bypass standard contracting procedures and quickly put in place a road so that the 51 residents can easily exit and enter their community, officials said.

Assistant County Administrator John Sandy said that four-wheel-drive first-response vehicles are able to reach the neighborhood using a dirt path through a cornfield and that the county would like to build a road there for all vehicles.

But Sandy and other officials were hesitant about pledging help beyond that.

“The county has not agreed to do anything yet in terms of anything related to a new bridge,” Sandy said.

Residents and county officials are unsure who owns the nearly 40-year-old private bridge, whose railings shifted during the flooding.

One resident, Lori Latka, said people with four-wheel-drive vehicles have been able to use the path in the cornfield. Others, she said, “held their breath and drove across the very slanted, crooked bridge one time to leave their vehicle out,” she said.

Those residents are keeping their vehicles parked along Lime Kiln Road, then walking across the bridge to get back to their properties. For some, including Latka, the walk is nearly a mile.

“We’re all just a little bit fearful that when it stops raining and two or three weeks go by, we might be in a really tough spot still,” she said.

Because of the questions surrounding ownership of the bridge, it’s unclear who is responsible for repairs.

“As far as we’re concerned, it’s a private bridge,” said Loudoun Chief Fire Marshal Keith Brower. “Unless something would turn out differently, it’s private, and the county does not get involved in private ownership issues or anything like that.”

Bowers said that although Crooked Bridge is privately owned, the county has a “moral responsibility” to make sure that the residents have access to and from their property.

“We’re going to have to help them work through this,” Bowers said. “Whether or not there will be bridge access in the future is still up in the air. And who’s going to be responsible ultimately to do that, that’s another question out there. So right now we have more questions than answers.”

There are other concerns when discussing the building of a bridge, Sandy said, including environmental ones, “because it goes over a scenic river.” He noted that more regulations exist now than when the bridge was built in the 1960s.

Tagged: weather

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