LAKE Louis Normand and John Paul Taylor used shovels to dig into the muck around bridge piles underneath Summerfield Road as traffic passed overhead in northeastern Ascension Parish.

The contractors with Durable Piling Restoration of Marksville were recently preparing to cut out and replace parts of the timber piles and do other foundation work to the two bridges that are the only way through a lowland forest and into the Summerfield subdivision along the Amite River.

The repair job, which is now nearing completion, involved two of the 19 bridges that Ascension Parish government has repaired or replaced since Parish President Kenny Matassa took office in January 2016, a parish government spokesman said.

The state Department of Transportation and Development has been busy with its own bridge repairs in the parish as well, and wrapped up emergency repairs to a bridge on La. 933 in the St. Amant area Thursday, a department spokesman said.

Ascension has 136 bridges on parish roads and another 132 bridges on state highways, and it seems every few weeks parish or state officials are announcing partial or complete bridge closures sometimes of the emergency variety, as was the work on the Summerfield Road and La. 933 bridges.

But parish and state officials said the 2016 flood in the Amite River Basin, which inundated large swaths of East Ascension Parish, did not directly damage bridges in the parish. Some officials, however, think the high water may have indirectly helped bring about the recent round of repairs.

Bill Roux, parish public works director, said last year's floodwater washed out parts of the earthen bases around some bridges and revealed rot among many of the parish's timber bridges that inspectors spotted later.

"It exposed a condition that we couldn't see before because it was all covered, and that is what the DOTD is seeing now in inspection. They said, 'Oh, wait, this is bad,'" Roux said.

Rodney Mallett, DOTD spokesman, said though the agency does its biennial inspections in odd-numbered years, the agency has issued six letters to the parish since the start of 2016 for bridgeson parish roads that needed repair. In addition to those six bridges, a seventh parish bridge was closed but has been repaired and reopened, according to a DOTD tally from early June.

More recently, DOTD also closed the La. 933bridge about one-tenth of a mile west of Joe Sevario Road on June 19. A routine inspection found large empty spaces under both of the bridge's approach slabs, Mallett said. Earth should have been where the voids were found under the bridge approaches.

Kyle Gautreau, parish government spokesman, said that since the start of 2016, the parish has spent more than $830,000 on bridge work, not including the Summerfield job. While some of that work was minor, like guard rail repairs, $483,000 was spent to replace or upgrade eight bridges. The parish often replaced old timber bridges with large concrete box culverts that had new roads laid on top of them.

Four more timber bridges weren't replaced with culverts but had supporting wooden piles replaced at a cost of an additional $312,000, Gautreau said. Once finished, the Summerfield bridges will bring that number to six, though total cost figures weren't immediately available.

Peter DeCuir, vice president and chief operating officer of Durable Piling, said DOTD and local governments often choose his services because his company can work on bridges without bridge closures, as his company was able to do on Summerfield Road, maintaining the only access route to homes in the area.

On Summerfield's bridges, DeCuir's workers cut out the damaged portion of piles, nine on one bridge and 11 on another, and replaced them with a composite material using epoxy and Kevlar.

"And it's never going to rot," DeCuir said.

The Summerfield job became more involved than first planned, though, as more damage was discovered. In addition to piles, workers had to fill in voids under some of those bridges' approaches.

DeCuir said the job is nearly complete despite delays from recent heavy rains. He said Thursday that he is waiting on water levels to drop again so he can finish protecting one of the bridge's foundations with concrete.

It appears Summerfield Road won't be the end of Durable Piling's time in Ascension Parish, though. At Roux's urging in early June, the East Ascension drainage board agreed to increase funding to Durable Piling from a maximum of $275,000 to up to $400,000 for some additional emergency repairs to Summerfield Road and for expected repairs to other damaged bridges.

"We do have other bridges that (are) coming on line with some problems we're discovering," Roux told the board, "and I want to increase it to $400,000 to make sure I have enough to take care of those things."

Follow David J. Mitchell on Twitter, @NewsieDave.

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Flood of 2016 exposed lingering damage to Ascension bridges; repairs continue - The Advocate