The Texas Department of Transportation is evaluating the Pelican Island Causeway Bridge over the Galveston Channel after a barge ran aground on it. TxDOT had already planned to replace the bridge before the incident.
A US Coast Guard-led effort is also cleaning up 1,000 to 2,000 gallons of vacuum diesel that spilled from the barge during the incident.
The 3,239-foot-long bascule bridge was built in 1960 and is the only crossing to Pelican Island, which is located north of Galveston in Galveston Bay. At around 10am on May 15, barge MMLP 321, owned by Martin Marine, broke loose due to a coupling problem and collided with part of the bridge. This strike caused the concrete of a decommissioned parallel railway line, which no longer spanned the entire canal even before the incident, to collapse onto the barge and damage a tank containing about 160,000 gallons of fuel, according to officials with a unified command formed to address the problem. situation.
There were no injuries.
The bridge is open intermittently to vehicular and pedestrian traffic leaving the island while TxDOT and Galveston County Navigation District 1 officials assess its condition.
“At this point we’ve determined it’s OK for pedestrian traffic, but until we move the barge we can’t make a full assessment of the submergence,” Capt. Keith Donohue, commander of Coast Guard Sector Houston, told reporters – Galveston. press conference
As of May 17, Coast Guard officials said the barge was no longer discharging oil. They set up more than 16,000 feet of containment to reduce the spread of the spilled oil. Donohue said the unified command had recovered 605 gallons of the oily water mixture as of May 16, as well as another 5,640 gallons of oil that had seeped onto the top of the barge but did not reach Water.
It was not immediately clear what caused the barge’s docking problem, but Rick Freed, vice president of Martin Marine, told reporters that strong winds related to bad weather in the area this week had not played a role.
Map courtesy of the US Coast GuardTxDOT had already planned to build a fixed span bridge west of the current bridge to replace it, as officials say it has reached the end of its structural design life. In a presentation on the plan last August, officials noted that a sudden closure of the current bridge for repairs would cut off access to the island.
The proposed bridge would be 65 feet wide, compared to the existing bridge’s 30-foot width, to add shoulders to the road and a shared path for pedestrians and cyclists. The bridge’s main span would have 73 feet of vertical clearance, compared to 13 feet with the current bridge, and 238 feet of horizontal clearance, meeting Gulf Intracoastal Waterway requirements. The railway line would be removed as part of the project.
TxDOT officials have estimated the cost of the project at $194 million and said they aim for construction to begin in 2027, although that was before the barge incident.
