85-year-old South Omaha bridge dropping hunks of concrete on road below (2024)

Manuel Rosas might want to invest in a hardhat.

Rosas, 47, drives a forklift for Tasman, a leather-production company at 37th and L Streets near the South Omaha Stockyards.

Much of his day is spent hauling pallets of cowhide in a storage yard underneath the 85-year-old L Street bridge that stretches over the BNSF railroad tracks from 36th Street to 39th Street.

Oh, and dodging chunks of concrete that have fallen from the crumbling bridge deck above his head.

“This thing is bad,” Rosas said with a laugh, as he sat in his forklift and surveyed the jagged edges and corroded metal rebar above his head.

Rosas said he’s never seen any concrete fall. But he has seen the fist-sized chunks that have peppered the storage yard next to 38th Street, which runs under the bridge.

And he’s been amused by traffic engineers and reporters who have stopped by to view the spectacle since a video of a hole in the bridge hit social media a couple of weeks ago.

“Sometimes I’m driving (the forklift), and I see them with their cameras,” Rosas said. “For me, it’s normal. I’m working here every day.”

This is the second time since May that holes have popped through the bridge deck.

“It rained concrete and created a big hole,” said Omaha City Council member Ron Hug, who represents South Omaha. “The holes broke through, and the concrete landed on 38th Street. Luckily, none of it has hit anyone.”

After receiving alarmed texts and phone calls from his constituents, Hug hosted a town hall meeting last Monday so residents could hear directly from traffic engineers from the Nebraska Department of Transportation about their plans for the bridge. About 30 residents attended.

“They are concerned,” Hug said. “People in the neighborhood walk under that bridge, and drive over it.”

‘It’s starting to show its age’

Jim Laughlin, NDOT’s district operations and maintenance manager, said the pillars for the bridge were put down in 1939, when Omaha’s stockyards were at their peak and L Street was the gateway to the Stockyards district.

“This was an incredible engineering feat in its day,” Laughlin said.

The current bridge deck, 9 inches thick, was poured in 1977 and received some patching and joint work in 2010.

“Other than that, it’s just been maintenance — patching holes when it’s needed,” Laughlin said. “It’s starting to show its age.”

The main culprit of the problems, he said, is the salty brine used to melt ice and snow during Omaha’s often-harsh winters. The brine mixes with the water and seeps through cracks in the deck, causing the concrete and the steel rebar frame that gives the bridge deck its structure.

Laughlin said the first holes appeared in the deck in late May, a month that saw 11.13 inches of rainfall in Omaha — the second-wettest May in the city’s history.

NDOT quickly patched the holes, he said, using a strong, quick-setting concrete reinforced with polymer. But the bridge started to crumble again by early August.

“We’ve had a wet summer, and it probably let water through. It finally gave out,” Laughlin said. “We’re trying to seal up everything on top and stop this from happening.”

That’s involved some lane closures on L Street this past week. The repair work has been done at night, though a lane has been closed during the daytime, too.

Laughlin said engineers are also using drones to conduct scans of the concrete from underneath in the hope of detecting weak spots in the bridge deck before they turn into holes.

Plans to replace the bridge are years away

At a public hearing in April 2023, NDOT unveiled plans to completely rebuild the bridge beginning in 2027, at an estimated $9.1 million cost. It would be similar in scope to the 2022-23 replacement of the 42nd Street bridge just south of Interstate 80, or the rebuilding of the Stockyards bridge on L Street just west of the Kennedy Freeway in 2014-15.

Since the hearing, though, the project has been pushed back to 2029. Laughlin said another bridge on L Street, at 72nd Street, is actually in worse shape and will be rebuilt first. So will another bridge in Elkhorn.

“We try to prioritize and keep an eye on the bridges,” Laughlin said.

Given the now-obvious deterioration of the L Street viaduct, Hug said he would like to see NDOT move the replacement project back up again.

Laughlin, though, said that would be difficult because of the need to coordinate with the railroad and multiple utility companies.

“I think people understood we can’t move projects around,” he said.

Failing that, Hug said, perhaps the bridge deck could be rebuilt on the west end of the viaduct, where the damage is the worst.

“It’s kind of the beating heartbeat of South Omaha,” he said. “To get anywhere, you have to go over that bridge.”