Man questions pedestrian safety of Roanoke River bridge

Standing on the 1,000-foot-long parkway bridge over the Roanoke River, he saw that that the railing designed to keep people and vehicles from going into the abyss was just under 3 feet tall.

“My heart was in my mouth,” he said.

He was certain something was off given that the bridge is open to foot traffic on a narrow sidewalk beside the rail — and the drop from the highest part is 160 feet to the ground below.

After returning from the location, which is 4 miles east of Roanoke, and delving into some research, he concluded the railing is 9 inches short. That was in 2019, maybe 2020, he said. When the bridge was left unchanged during extensive maintenance work costing more than $2 million, Collins contacted The Roanoke Times, saying he felt compelled to alert the public.

Blue Ridge Parkway officials acknowledge that the railing is 33 inches tall, 9 inches less than the 42 inches of railing the bridge would have if built today. No requirement exists to raise the railing, nor do officials plan to do so, they said.

Collins is a former geologist with the U.S. Forest Service, now retired and living in Troutville. Fifty years in forest management acclimated Collins to rugged settings. Part of his job entailed protecting visitors from landslides, rock falls, sinkholes and other geological hazards. Even if the law doesn’t require an update of the railing to the current building code, as parkway officials said, Collin said the doctrine of hazard mitigation should compel the Blue Ridge Parkway, a unit of the National Park Service, to act.

“They can’t just ignore it,” Collins, 79, said Wednesday.

Collins does not know if anybody has fallen off not intending to take their own lives, but thinks it could easily happen. When venturing out onto the high bridge, people “want to see the view. They’re focused on the view. It’s not on safety,” he said.

The low railing, he added, “makes it very easy to commit suicide. There you just go off, boom, you’re gone.”

No count of suicides appears to exist. In 2010, Roanoke County police said they had gone to the location 15 times for suicides or attempted suicides since 2000.

Parkway officials said they knew of no fatal falls unrelated to suicide. But there was at least one homicide, court testimony showed. That was the case of an 18-year-old man who went to prison in 1984 for pushing a 72-year-old Bedford County man to his death from the bridge and later forging eight of the man’s checks.

An official with Friends of the Blue Ridge, an advocacy group formerly called Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway, said she had no information about the friends group ever considering the railing an issue.

Crews built the bridge in 1963 consistent with other Blue Ridge Parkway bridges to mesh with the landscape and to primarily carry traffic not pedestrians, said Jim Grant, chief of maintenance and engineering for the parkway. The current building code’s 42-inch railing requirement had not yet gone into effect.

A 33-inch handrail was “very appropriate for a roadway bridge designed during that period” nearly 60 years ago, according to an email from Leesa Brandon, a parkway spokeswoman.

The railing’s 33-inch height “wouldn’t meet the current code,” Grant said. “Are we required to raise it? We are not.”

There are also 33 inches of railing also installed on parkway’s Glade Creek bridge, about 7 miles north of the Roanoke River, and built around the same time as the river bridge. In contrast, the railing is 41 inches high on a large bridge built over a ravine in 1996 for a road to Explore Park.

Officials did close the parkway’s Roanoke River bridge in spring 2021 to summer 2022 to repair concrete piers, replace the waterproofing membrane and asphalt on the driving surface, repaint structural steel and do other work for $2.2 million, the first upgrade of this type since 1985.

Inspectors had found “critical deficiencies related to the bridge deck and super structure,” Brandon said. She said the agency and Federal Highway Administration allocate approximately $15 million annually for maintenance of the entire parkway, which is 469 miles long with 168 bridges and 26 tunnels.

The railing in questions didn’t need repair, nor was it a known hazard, Brandon said.

According to Collins, the agency could formally acknowledge the rail height questions and seek public input on such ideas as raising the railing, closing the walkway or posting warnings.