The City of Meridian is making progress on its plan to replace the Old Highway 80 bridge.

Hugh Smith, the city’s public works director, said the Mississippi Department of Transportation has approved the city’s plans for the bridge, and he will update the City Council on the project at the council’s next work session on Oct. 27.

Smith said he and the council will discuss when to start the construction project at the meeting. He hopes the project will be completed as soon as possible.

He said in February that the existing bridge has several points of deterioration and does not meet safety guidelines. MDOT is providing Meridian $3.5 million to replace the structure.

Smith said the city is in the process of acquiring additional property, as the new bridge has a different footprint than the existing one. The new structure will be a little bit longer than the previous one, he said.

The bridge has to follow state guidelines that were not in place when it was originally built in 1926. Its support structures will be outside of the stream, because the state restricts the interference of support structures with the flow of a stream.

Smith said the project ran into delays because the design had to be approved by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The bridge is historic because of the time it was built and its design, he said. It is a metal truss bridge.

“If you look at the bridge itself, you don’t see many of those today from that era of construction,” Smith noted.

He said that when construction starts, traffic will be re-routed. 

The bridge is part of U.S. Route 80. In the 1910’s, an organization in Savannah, Georgia, came up with the idea of making a highway from coast to coast, according to the Federal Highway Administration. The highway, once built, stretched from Savannah to San Diego. Today, the route only runs from Savannah to Dallas.