For many families, summer checkups and sports physicals are part of the back-to-school routine. Therefore, August was an appropriate month for us to perform checkups on our products around the Dayton area, including pedestrian bridge decks and trail bridges. Here's what we found.
We visited our first pedestrian bridge deck at Huffman’s Prairie bike trail and trail bridges in Phillips Park in Beavercreek, Germantown Metropark, and Red Lion-Five Points Road in Springboro. All the structures were performing well and show no signs of any maintenance needs. Furthermore, the trail bridges (Phillips Park, Germantown, Red Lion-Five Points) showed no damage from the recent summer storms that ripped through the Miami Valley. In fact, a few summers ago, the Phillips Park bridge survived a falling tree without sustaining any damage.
The Red Lion-Five Points trail bridge was just installed in May and now has a newly-paved sidewalk, young grass and rock piles that lead users under the bridge and down to the creek. The other projects we examined have exhibited little change since our last visits (some of which were a few years ago). This is no surprise, as FRP composite decks and bridges require no maintenance - a huge advantage for bridge owners.
