Flood damage to Interstate 29 near Hamburg, Iowa, is worse than what roads officials had hoped to see.
An 11-foot deep — and growing — hole has been scoured beneath I-29 where it goes up an embankment to an overpass, said Bob Younie, head of maintenance for the Iowa Department of Transportation.
"I would call this a setback in what I hoped would be the recovery from the flooding," Younie said Thursday.
The stretch of I-29 was closed in June because of the Missouri River flooding.
There are four Interstate bridges in that area. The worst case is that all four bridges get washed out by flooding, and so far that hasn't happened.
Younie said the best case, now off the table, was that the bridges and their approaches would escape unscathed.
So far, one bridge approach has seen significant scouring, and a parallel bridge is threatened by scouring.
"We really need to wait for the water to go down so that we can assess the road," Younie said.
How soon that will happen is uncertain because it's not known how long it will take the floodplain to drain, he said.
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