Officials work to repair eroding bridge in Los Lunas
By Julian Paras
Click here for updates on this story
LOS LUNAS, New Mexico (KOAT) — Crews are making progress fixing the Los Lunas River Bridge in Los Lunas after it began to erode Saturday night.
Early Monday morning, authorities told KOAT one lane of Highway 6 in each direction is back open.
Residents are curious how this could have happened.
“What the heck is going on?” Matt Mondragon said. “I mean, how severe is this going to be? I mean we just got this bridge.”
When it eroded, a rescue took place for a father and son that fell in Saturday night.
Mondragon as a long-time Los Lunas resident, said he was shocked to hear about the Los Lunas River Bridge.
New Mexico Department of Transportation PIO for District 3, Kimberly Gallegos, said “we started getting crews out here to look at the situation.”
NMDOT said culverts under the bridge are experiencing higher than usual levels of water which they say lead to this hole in the bridge.
“That’s when we started to realize that we had to get traffic off of this roadway,” Gallegos said.
For many residents, like Matt, he says this bridge is the only convenient access point to get to and from places in Los Lunas.
“It’s going to certainly be a problem for the community. I mean this is our only east-west corridor through town,” Mondragon said.
DOT says they will be updating the community frequently to make sure people know how work is coming along.
“They’re getting together to kind of dig out some areas underneath that bridge and make sure that nothing has eroded past the center line,” Gallegos said.
With bridge repairs underway, residents say they hope it will be finished sooner rather than later.
“I just hope we get the proper people to inspect it, and they say it’s fine to go, and something like this never happens again,” Mondragon said.
Officials said they don’t have an idea of when they will finish fixing the bridge, but will update people as soon as possible.
Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.
