Roger Schnabel’s Southeast Roadbuilders Inc. removed the old Klehini River Bridge last week, the same bridge his father installed 50 years ago.
“My dad put it in and his son took it out,” Schnabel said. “It’s the way things go.”
The Klehini bridges’ two steel truss spans were once components of the Juneau Mendenhall Bridge, according to the Alaska Department of Transportation. The Mendenhall Bridge was taken down to make way for the Brotherhood Bridge. The Mendenhall’s trusses sat on the roadside near the river crossing for five years, drowned twice a day by each high tide.
When commercial logging began in the Porcupine Creek watershed in the early 1960s, access across the river was needed. Roger’s father, John Schnabel, rescued one of those trusses in 1968 to construct the first Klehini crossing.
“I recall him telling a story how he put it in, and he put the center pier and the abutments in on dry ground and then excavated underneath the bridge and put the river underneath him.”
The single truss couldn’t hold up to the elements, however, and John Schnabel rebuilt the bridge in 1971,
“The single span was installed at the current location across the Klehini River but the rising of the spring runoff caused a flood that undercut the western bank and bridge approach making the structure unusable,” state records say.
A state bridge engineer recommended the relocation of the bridge and approach road. The state provided Schnabel an additional abandoned truss for the bridge’s reconstruction.
To remove the bridge components, Southeast Roadbuilders used three pieces of heavy equipment that weighed more than 250,000 pounds.
“I don’t think my father had a piece of equipment over 50,000 pounds, yet he was able to put it in with ease,” Roger Schnabel said.
The 1969 single steel truss bridge wasn’t the only crossing that was washed out. According to articles in several 1912 editions of the Pioneer Press, officials planned to build a bridge across the Klehini near Pleasant Camp.
“The completion of this bridge which was washed out last year by the high floods will be warmly welcomed by the mine owners and prospectors who are operating in the Rainy Hollow country,” a March 9, 1912 Pioneer Press article states.
In 1927, a man working on a crew attempting to construct a bridge “30 miles west of Haines” across the “Klehena river” fell through the ice and drowned, according to an obituary found in Sheldon Museum records.
Years later, in 1987, a plow truck broke through the decking of the Klehini River Bridge, causing the state to prohibit snowplows, fuel trucks and logging vehicles from crossing the bridge, according to CVN records.
Roger Schnabel installed the new Klehini River Bridge last year.