Texas flooding: Cow Creek Bridge reopens in Marble Falls

Cow Creek Bridge reopens

A re-opening of the Cow Creek Bridge was celebrated on Tuesday after it was destroyed during deadly flooding in July.

MARBLE FALLS, Texas - Governor Greg Abbott delivered remarks at the Cow Creek Bridge Re-Opening Ceremony in Marble Falls. 

"This bridge was eliminated. It did not exist a month ago, and in just a short month period of time they were able to put together the pieces and finish the construction, getting this bridge completed," Abbott said.

Cow Creek Bridge reopening ceremony in Marble Falls

Governor Abbott delivers remarks at the Cow Creek Bridge Re-Opening Ceremony in Marble Falls. The bridge was rapidly rebuilt in 29 days after being washed out by catastrophic flooding.

What happened to Cow Creek Bridge?

The backstory:

The bridge was rapidly rebuilt in 29 days after being washed out by catastrophic flooding.

TxDOT officials expedited construction after water rushed through Cow Creek, washing away the 1431 bridge. 

The bridge connects Lago Vista to Marble Falls and was the only direct route.

Cow Creek bridge about halfway done

A month after the deadly and devastating floods, crews are about halfway done on a new bridge that connects Marble Falls and Lago Vista.

TxDOT awarded an emergency contract to Hunter Industries at a cost of $4 million. The contractor had the ability to earn up to a million dollars in incentives by finishing the bridge up to 20 days early.

Officials said the aim was to get the bridge back up by the time the school year started.

Changes to the bridge

This bridge will look different from the one that was standing before, which was built in 1960.

"This bridge was designed to the current engineering standards, making it slightly higher and wider, meaning that the bridge will be approximately 5 feet higher than the previous bridge," TxDOT Austin District Engineer Tucker Ferguson said in a previous interview with FOX 7.

Cow Creek bridge detour near Lago Vista

A detour is now in place for the RM 1431 bridge at Cow Creek between Lago Vista and Marble Falls.

The bridge will have 12-foot travel lanes, 6-foot shoulders, and a 2-foot striped median.

"It's more robust by today's standards," Tucker Ferguson, Austin district engineer with TxDOT said.

He says it would be able to withstand a major flood. 

"The waterway opening is larger, so hydraulically it can accept more floodwaters, the columns are larger," Ferguson said.

Dig deeper:

If you're wondering how TxDOT finished this bridge so fast, yet other projects take so long, they say the timeline was sped up because of the emergency.

"Anytime there's an emergency, the governor declares an emergency, that allows us to compress many of our procurement rules and processes," Ferguson said.

He says typically a project like this would take 12 months. They found beams they could use from another project in the Yoakum district, which sped up the process. 

The bridge also represents another step in recovery.

"It will assure that we will reconnect the people, reconnect the communities, get things back to normal for all the people who were affected by this process," Abbott said.

Marble Falls honors fallen volunteer fire chief

The Marble Falls community came together to honor its fallen volunteer fire chief, Michael Phillips.

The first vehicles to cross the bridge were firetrucks from the Marble Falls Fire Department. Their chief is still missing after responding to the floods.

"There's no better representation of somebody to be the first drive across the bridge than those first responders that had such a very difficult task on the day of July 5th," Marc Williams, executive director of TxDOT, said.