ROSEVILLE – Roseville’s East First Street bridge has been closed, and it could be around a year before its replaced and reopened.
The Muskingum County Engineer’s Office made the call to shut it down June 23 after a recent inspection and three-ton load limit test revealed the bridge’s beams had deteriorated from the crushing of continual heavy truck usage.
“We determined that immediate closure was necessary to ensure the safety of drivers and passengers of all vehicular traffic,” stated an engineer’s office announcement from June 23.
“This is always a tricky situation. I hate to do it,” noted Mark Eicher, the Muskingum County engineer, on June 26, but it became a safety issue.
“There are too many beams that have deteriorated,” he added. Several beams were so bad that they had three-foot-long perforations.
All bridges have to be replaced sooner or later, Eicher said, but the First Street bridge’s fate was expedited after the truck usage.
The bridge was already scheduled for replacement in 2026, so it wasn’t financially logical to do so in 2025, even if the funding had already been secured.
It could now be closed for around a year. Funding bridge projects is slow-going, regardless, Eicher noted. It usually requires a five-year outlook to plan a replacement.
It’s too early for a construction timeline. Eicher hoped to put the project out to bid in early 2026. It’ll eventually cost around $1.98 million. The funding comes from a federal grant and the Infrastructure Bill.
A detour route and the appropriate signage have already been established, said Jeff Slack, Roseville’s village administrator, June 26.
The best detour, similar to the one for flooding events, will take drivers from Cannelville Road onto Cheney Street, then James Street, then Athens Road, which leads to South Main Street, and vice versa, coming from southern Roseville.
Parking has been closed off on some side streets, Slack noted, like portions of James Street and the stretch of Cheney Street between James and where First Street starts.
Sidewalks will remain open to pedestrian traffic, the engineer’s office also confirmed.
Shawn Digity is a reporter for the Zanesville Times Recorder. He can be emailed at sdigity@gannett.com or found on X at @ShawnDigityZTR.
This article originally appeared on Zanesville Times Recorder: ‘Immediate closure was necessary’: Roseville’s First Street bridge will be replaced in ’26
Reporting by Shawn Digity, Zanesville Times Recorder / Zanesville Times Recorder
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