U.S. Agency Picks Site for Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge

The Federal Highway Administration picked a site Friday for a bypass bridge to lift heavy traffic from the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River.

The agency submitted a final environmental report selecting Sugarloaf Mountain as the preferred of three alternatives, said Ken Davis and Nathan Banks, project engineers in the highway administration’s Phoenix office.

The move starts the clock on a 30-day comment period before the agency approves plans for a four-lane bridge near Hoover Dam.

The nearly $200-million arch, a quarter-mile downstream from the dam, would carry U.S. 93 between southern Nevada and northwestern Arizona.

After final approval and design, construction could begin in 2002 and take five years, Banks said.

All sides say something needs to be done to relieve a perpetual conga line of tractor-trailers, motor homes and cars snaking through two-lane hairpin turns and crawling through camera-toting pedestrians.

The Sugarloaf route is the least expensive of three options that Banks said have been under study for more than 10 years. Alternate bridge sites at Gold Strike Canyon, one mile downstream from the dam, and Promontory Point, over Lake Mead about 1,000 feet north of the dam, were rejected.

Fred Dexter, chairman of the Sierra Club’s Hoover Dam Bypass committee and a resident of nearby Boulder City, said he expects challenges will be lodged against the plan on legal, environmental, emotional and aesthetic grounds.

He said the Sierra Club is prepared to sue to stop the planning.

“We strongly support a Hoover Dam bypass,” Dexter said. “It is absolutely necessary. But they’ve never given full study to the Laughlin-Bullhead alternative.”

He said a bridge on U.S. 95 between Laughlin and Bullhead City, Ariz., 60 miles downstream from the dam, would be less expensive, take less time to build and pose less risk to the environment.

American Indian tribes in the area point to the cultural significance of the river.

The highway administration says it received comments from 13 tribes.

The highway administration says the current road carries 11,500 vehicles a day. Trucks make up almost one in five vehicles on the dam.