PLEASANT HILL — Residents had been warned it was coming, but now the date has been set.
Beginning on Feb. 16, the Missouri Department of Transportation will be officially closing the Dr. Fred L. Seevers Memorial Bridge on 7 Highway.
The road will be closed from 7 a.m. Feb. 16 until December.
The official detour routes for this closure will be State Route P to 291 Highway and 50 Highway for northbound traffic and 58 Highway to 291 Highway for southbound traffic.
The bridge, best known as the green bridge, was built in 1948 and is nearing the end of its service life. The bridge will be replaced with a girder-style bridge and have intermittent impacts to the Rock Island Trail.
Travis Jones, the road and bridge director for Cass County, said the bridge replacement would be more cost effective than an attempt to repair it.
“Bridges get to a point where they’re beyond repair, and that’s an old pony truss bridge,” Jones said. “All the seals are up above the bridge deck because there used to be a railroad that went under.”
“Stuff that’s exposed to the weather and the elements starts to rust over time,” Jones said. “Over the years it gets to a point where it’s rusted enough that [MoDOT] says, ‘OK, we can fix it at some point, we can do a few repairs,’ and that is what they did 10 or 15 years ago when they closed it the first time.”
The original truss-style bridge can be more difficult and costly to maintain but the new girder-style bridge should better fit the needs of the area.
“Now it’s to a point where there’s enough weathering and the rest of the wear and tear that it’s no longer cost effective to actually repair that bridge,” Jones said. “It’s actually much cheaper to go in and replace it with a concrete girder bridge.”
The Cass County Road and Bridge Department is planning for Purvis Road to be one of the major detour routes for vehicles traveling north and south on 7 Highway. The other detour routes according to the Missouri Department of Transportation will be 58 Highway and 291 Highway.
“We’ve had really good communications from the County Road and Bridge Department,” said Mark Lopez, fire chief for the Pleasant Hill Fire Protection District. “They’ve been really a great help to us and making the necessary adjustments to a bridge that is not something that was on their list of things to do for this year.”
Lopez noted that the PHFPD relies heavily on its local partners and has a great working relationship with South Metropolitan in Raymore, Southern Jackson County and Lee’s Summit’s Fire Protection District.
Lopez noted that this construction will likely have an effect on their response time when needing to head south.
