The Mississippi Department of Transportation is stepping up itsenforcement of weight limits on posted bridges throughout the statein an effort to ensure safety on school bus routes for the comingschool year.

MDOT Chief of Enforcement Willie Huff said the department willbe monitoring all of the 220 posted bridges on state highways atdifferent times throughout the coming weeks and calling on locallaw enforcement to keep watch over the approximately 2,900 postedbridges on county and city roads.

“We’ll be sitting out there watching for trucks,” Huff said.”We’ll be on patrol and sitting at different bridges, waiting tosee if we have any vehicles in excess of the posted weightlimits.”

Huff said MDOT could not cover all of the state highway postedbridges simultaneously, and would be visiting different bridgesrandomly. Lincoln County has only one state highway posted bridge,which is part of Highway 550, 1.8 miles west of Highway 51.

Lincoln County Sheriff Steve Rushing said his department alwayskeeps a close eye on bus routes and general school traffic.

“We just try to patrol the areas and make sure it’s safe,” hesaid. “The supervisors are real good about keeping the bridges up,and we just work with them. If we see anything, we let thesupervisors and the school districts know about it.”

Huff said MDOT officers will write tickets for vehicles thatexceed the posted limits on state highway bridges. The violation isdisregard for a traffic control device, and the justice court setsthe misdemeanor penalties.

To make sure that a district’s school buses are safe to travelon their assigned routes, Huff said MDOT will tour the state’sschool districts with its 120 sets of portable scales to weigh thebuses.

“If they want their buses weighed, we can weigh them on ourplatform scales in four or five minutes,” he said. “We’ll bringthem to the school, free of charge.”

Lincoln County School District Transportation Director BruceFalvey said the county schools’ buses have never been weighedbefore, and he will look into MDOT’s offer. He said bus weights inthe past have been determined by the weight of the bus as listed bythe factory, but fully loaded bus weights have not beendetermined.

“When you put a lot of kids and their book bags on those buses,it adds up in a hurry,” Falvey said. “With 60 kids on a bus, andall of them packing a 30-pound book bag, it gets pretty heavy.”

Falvey said he would like to weigh each bus with MDOT’s scalesin the afternoon when the fleet departs the schools on theirroutes. He said the weights would vary from day to day, but thedifferences should be acceptable to the bridges’ posted limits.

Aside from enforcing weight limits on bridges around the stateand helping school districts weigh their buses, MDOT is also urgingschool districts to make sure their lists of posted bridges are upto date. Huff said many counties may have posted new bridges, orlowered the weight limits on existing posted bridges, during thesummer.

Dungan Engineering, PA Civil Engineer Ryan Holmes said 72 ofLincoln County’s 300 bridges are posted, and approximately 20 ofthose 72 have had their weight limits altered this year. Thechanges are kept up to date on county maps, he said, and those mapsare available to the county’s two school districts.

“We have an updated list every year of bridge postings,” hesaid. “We can provide school districts with whatever informationthey need to make sure their bus routes are safe.”