Design Work to Begin on Walerga Road Bridge Replacement Project

Published on April 19, 2016

A project to replace the aging and often-flooded Walerga Road bridge in Placer County is set to begin as the county board of supervisors today approved a professional engineering services contract to design the replacement. The bridge is located in southern Placer County near the Placer and Sacramento county line.

The bridge, built in 1973, regularly floods and is a narrow, two-lane roadway over Dry Creek. The bridge has inadequate road space and the approaches do not meet current flood protection standards. The new bridge will be bigger, longer and 12 feet higher. New development in the area has stressed the old bridge’s ability to handle current traffic and future needs will compound the problem.

The project will construct a new bridge and roadway approaches to provide four lanes of traffic with sufficient shoulder widths for bike lanes and pedestrian walkways. The new bridge and approaches will reduce flood-related closures by having a design that surpasses a flood with a 1-in-200 chance of occurring in any given year. The existing bridge typically floods every two to five years.

The county published a request for proposals and received four responses. After evaluating the proposals, Drake Haglan and Associates of Rancho Cordova was the unanimous winner and has been awarded the $2.6 million contract.

The $2.6 million cost to design the replacement is budgeted through the county’s Department of Public Works and Facilities budget. The total cost of the bridge replacement is $23 million. The county continues to leverage the Federal Highway Bridge Program, which will pay for most of the project cost. The remainder will come from county traffic mitigation fee programs. Construction is expected to begin as soon as 2018.