- If you're gonna talk about bridges in Grays Harbor County you have to think about the geography of Grays Harbor, which is the fact you've got this body of water that empties into the Pacific Ocean and you have all these feeder rivers that flow into Grays Harbor.

Naturally, you're gonna need to put a bridge here and there to be able to move from point A to point B.

And then you have to go back and look at what was the thing that created the cities here in the first place or allowed the cities to grow and that's the fact that we've got a very wet environment, a very lush environment, a very rich place to grow trees.

And so for thousands of years before settlers showed up here to start harvesting those trees, you had a very mature forest that people's eyes got really wide when they first showed up here and said, man, there's money to be made here and there's towns to be built.

There's roads to be constructed and, naturally, bridges to be built.

Well, speaking as a historian, the importance of keeping an old bridge up and around is that it is part of the fabric of a community.

It becomes part of that routine, part of that connection they have to the place that they live.

I think those are all really important parts.

Now, if you're maintenance side of things on a bridge, you're gonna look at preserving a bridge as a much cheaper option than tearing it down and building a brand new bridge.

So certainly economics plays a big role, I think, in wanting to preserve bridges.

But if you have a good, solid, regular maintenance plan that's put into place there, those things should last indefinitely.

- I'm Colt Tatums and my title is Special Structures Engineer for Washington State Department of Transportation.

The downtime on one of these structures leads to a substantial detour for traffic.

So we inspect these bridges, like all bridges in Washington state, on at least a two year frequency.

We get a holistic view of the structure, how it's doing and what's going on with the bridge.

This is a minor crack.

It's not affecting the overall structural integrity of the beam here and just like bending a paperclip back and forth, eventually you're gonna break it.

The same can be true of a bridge, but it takes thousands, hundreds of thousands of load cycles to even develop a crack and then they take a long time to grow.

So we inspect for them, we monitor them, but not every crack is going to be of immediate concern for the safety of the bridge overall.

But if it is, certainly we're gonna take corrective action until we can assure that it's safe for the public.

- If people thought of Grays Harbor as having some iconic bridges, you really stop and think about it and you're like, yeah, there's some cool bridges down there.

You want to see those things saved.

You want to see them celebrated.

They really are things of beauty.

They're things of function.

They have an ability to really grab us as an identifier in place, you know.

So where you say, been over that a dozen times I've been over that a hundred times, a thousand times if you lived here.

We all can come back and kind of recognize where we've been.