PennDOT’s District 10 was rightfully honored last week for being the first in the state to reopen a bridge — which happens to be in Butler County — for traffic through an ongoing replacement project.

District 10 has completed 38 bridges — 11 are in Butler County — through the Pennsylvania Rapid Bridge Replacement Project (RBR), a public-private partnership that’s the first in the nation to group together hundreds of bridge replacements.

When the project is completed, it will have replaced 558 bridges across the state.

District 10 — which covers several counties, including Butler County — received a plaque from PennDOT officials Wednesday for completing the bridge project. The district also was the state’s first to reopen a bridge — one on Cruikshank Road in Middlesex Township over a tributary to Glade Run — after its renovation project.

Both District 10 and the RBR deserve praise for their work on the project.

The bridges upgraded through the initiative wouldn’t have been covered under traditional state transportation improvement program funds.

In other words, District 10 and the RBR replaced bridges that would not have received immediate attention otherwise. The bridges covered by the project were deemed to be structurally deficient, so their replacement provided an important public safety benefit.

District 10 also worked well under pressure to complete the project.

Upon being asked in 2015 to identify which bridges needed work, the district had about six months to identify, analyze and map out plans for the replacements.

Eight of the bridges — including four in Butler County — were considered “early completion bridges,” which meant they could be upgraded immediately.

While a civil engineer for the project said developmental and environmental easements required to get such a project started would typically take a year to obtain, District 10 managed to do so in a quarter of that amount of time.

A study released last spring by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association ranked Pennsylvania as the second worst in the nation — behind Iowa — for the most structurally deficient bridges.

The number dropped significantly — by more than 1,200 — over the past five years, and none of the most structurally deficient bridges cited are located in Butler County.

And that is likely due to projects like the one involving District 10 and the RBR. We hope the initiative will continue to provide safer passage for county drivers.

— NCD