Agency picks route for Hoover Dam bridge

Ken Ritter

Saturday, Jan. 20, 2001 | 9:41 a.m.

The Federal Highway Administration on Friday picked a site 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 highway administration approves plans for a four-lane bridge above Hoover Dam.

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

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

All sides agree 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 bridges 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 by the Feb. 20 deadline on legal, environmental, emotional and aesthetic grounds.

He said the Sierra Club is prepared to sue to stop project 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., some 60 miles downstream from the dam, would be less expensive, take less time to build and pose less risk to the environment.

Native American tribes in the area point to the cultural significance of the river to the earliest inhabitants of the arid southwest.

The highway administration says it received comments from 13 tribes.

Richard Arnold, executive director of the Indian Center in Las Vegas, has compared building on Sugarloaf Mountain to bulldozing a church or religious shrine.

The highway administration says the current road carries 11,500 vehicles a day and has an accident rate three times that of roads with similar volumes.

Trucks make up almost one in five of all traffic on the dam. The route has become a shipping lifeline in and out of fast-growing Las Vegas, 30 miles away.

The bridge would let authorities ban vehicles transporting explosives, radioactive material and flammable or caustic chemicals from the dam that forms Lake Mead, the area's key drinking water reservoir.