Loren Turner biking on the bridge. Photo courtesy of Dan Towers

A project that has taken over two years to complete in Greene County has finally reached the finish line.

Greene County Conservation Director Dan Towers says the bridge, that’s two miles south of Jefferson on the Raccoon River Valley Trail, collapsed from the 2019 ice jams is repaired and back open to the public. About 70-feet of the 600-foot structure was damaged and the entire bridge has been closed ever since. The project was a joint effort between the county, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the State Historic Preservation Office of Iowa. 

Towers is excited to have the bridge open again, both for local bike riders that can now travel further than two miles on the trail, as well as getting other bikers to come back up the trail and into Jefferson.

“We’ve lost a lot of the traffic we had coming from the (Des Moines) metro riding up to Jefferson, spending some time here, spending some money. We hope we can get that back again. For the last two years, those bikers have been making the trail loop and just continuing on their way. Jefferson does have a lot to offer. It’s kind of a destination because it has more to offer than a lot of the other towns along the trail. So we’re hoping we can rekindle that and get those out of town bikers back again.”

The project included replacing 400 of the 600-feet of the bridge with concrete piers and steel decking, which will prevent ice jams from damaging the bridge in the future. The total cost was $850,000 with 75-percent paid for through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, along with funding from Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Greene County.