State Transportation crews encountered no major troubles Wednesday night or Thursday morning as they repaired a section of the crossover lanes in Callaway County that carry traffic into the Missouri River Bridge at Jefferson City.
The work on westbound U.S. 54/southbound U.S. 63 closed one of the two traffic lanes from 7 p.m. Wednesday until about 6 a.m. Thursday.
"We were out of there before 6," MoDOT spokesman Gene McCoy told the News Tribune.
He also said there are no new updates on the repainting project that has closed the westbound bridge since April.
At the end of June, MoDOT said the $3 million painting project should be done by the end of August.
The project originally was scheduled for an Aug. 12 completion date, but the work started two weeks late because of issues surrounding the plans to remove the old paint - and that time hasn't been made up.
Missouri's Highways and Transportation Commission awarded a $7 million contract to Saffo Contractors, Wilmington, North Carolina - $1.4 million less than the original cost estimate.
The contract includes $3 million for the painting work, and another $4 million for other maintenance and repair work - mostly underneath the bridge deck, so it can be done even after the westbound traffic returns to the bridge.
Expansion devices, including rivets and joints, are being replaced if they show too much corrosion, construction inspector Doug Thomas said last month.
The closer they are to the water, the more likely they'll have to be addressed, Thomas said.
MoDOT has said the bridge carries about 28,000-30,000 vehicles a day - but maintenance supervisor Mike Belt said Wednesday some traffic counts have been as high as "about 50,000 (vehicles) a day. It sees a lot of traffic."
When the painting work is done next month, Thomas said, "The look of the bridge will not have changed."
The westbound bridge was opened to traffic in 1954, and MoDOT officials expect the repair work to extend its life by up to 25 years.
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PREVIOUS COVERAGE... Westbound traffic heading to the Missouri River Bridge into Jefferson City was reduced to one lane about 7 p.m. Wednesday.
It was expected to be reopened by 5:30 a.m. Thursday, the state Transportation department said Wednesday.
"In the right-hand lane of westbound U.S. 54, there are two panels of concrete that have cracked and are starting to move under traffic a little bit," said Mike Belt, a MoDOT maintenance superintendent. "Once those concrete sections start to move, they deteriorate pretty rapidly."
If not repaired, he said, the pavement would continue to break up and become a pothole.
Closing the one traffic lane was "just being proactive," Belt said.
The plan was to "saw out the piece of broken concrete and re-pour it, so that we don't have this fail where it would impact traffic during rush hour."
The new concrete was to be poured by midnight, then allowed to cure and harden until this morning.
The problem was on the Callaway County side of the bridge, in the crossover section built when the eastbound bridge was built in 1990-91.
That section normally doesn't carry traffic.
But it's being used now to shift the westbound traffic to the eastbound bridge during repainting of the other span.
"It sees a lot of traffic - basically, all the vehicles that travel through there on 54, which is about 50,000 a day," Belt said.
He said it wasn't safe to wait until the weekend to address the problem.
Belt said commuters on Thursday morning "shouldn't even realize we were there."