Granby Street Bridge’s big fix: Two-year repair project will limit traffic for months at a time

Norfolk — The Granby Street Bridge has seen better days.

The bridge has carried one of the city’s main thoroughfares over the Lafayette River since 1979, and as of late, its condition has gotten middling marks from state inspectors.

It will get a substantial overhaul starting next month.

The catch: it’ll take two years.

The bridge will remain open to traffic throughout the repairs — one side of the divided bridge will be closed for six months at a time while the other side has lanes headed in both directions.

But fewer lanes and lower speed limits mean traffic is likely to get clogged.

“If they could just close it and do it, they’d be able to do it a lot faster, but you can imagine a main road like Granby Street or Hampton Boulevard, diverting traffic around those would be costing businesses money,” said Richard Broad, Norfolk’s public works director. “We don’t want people to have to take long detours.”

Many of the bridge’s structural elements will be shored up or replaced, with a new driving surface and expansion joints, repair and waterproofing of structural elements of the bridge and rebuilt roadways and sidewalks on the approaches to the structure.

Broad said work on the Granby Street Bridge amounts to “preventative maintenance.”

The most recent state inspection of the Granby Street Bridge was in September 2018, according to VDOT records.

Inspections rate the condition of the three main parts of a bridge — the riding deck where cars drive, the superstructure that holds the deck up and the foundational substructure — on a scale from 0 to 9. The higher the rating, the better the condition.

The Granby Street Bridge scored 5′s across the board. When a bridge earns straight 4′s, VDOT designates it as “structurally deficient.” That label doesn’t necessarily mean a bridge is unsafe, only that it’s in serious need of maintenance and repair.

There aren’t major concerns about the bridge at the moment, Broad said, but as parts such as the driving surface wear, that can leave openings for deeper and more pervasive deterioration of concrete and steel.

Broad likens the work to home repairs — fixing small issues with your roof as they come up will prevent other problems and means you won’t be faced with one big, expensive fix later on.

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“This is to encourage the longevity of the bridge,” Broad said.

The job is expected to cost $7 million and wrap up late in 2022, though Broad said two years is an outside estimate to allow for delays like major storms.

Speeds on the bridge will drop to 25 mph starting at 40th Street in Riverview through to West Arden Circle on the north side of the river.

At least one sidewalk will be open for pedestrians, but the bike lane over the bridge will be closed for the duration, the city said.

The fishing pier on the east side of the bridge also will be closed for the duration of the project, but boats will still be able to pass beneath during construction.

You can get more information at norfolk.gov/granbybridge.

Ryan Murphy, 757-739-8582, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com