Yolo County, California Bridges: Sutter Slough Road Bridge

July 2013 (38.32783 Degrees, -121.57658 Degrees) Sutter Slough Road Bridge

Yolo County includes a narrow segment along the Sacramento River. Surprisingly, there are no bridges across this part of the Sacramento River (the Paintersville Bridge crosses the Sacramento River just south of Yolo County). At the southeastern tip of Yolo County the border switches from the Sacramento River to Sutter Slough and it's crossed by the Sutter Slough Bridge.

We previously studied the Sutter Slough Bridge (24C0011) during a series of blogs about movable bridges in 2010. Sutter Slough branches off the Sacramento River and the bridge allows vehicles to travel on the west side of the Sacramento River by crossing over the Sutter Slough Bridge. I believe that this bridge as well as most of the other movable bridges on the Sacramento River are now fixed spans since ship travel has moved to the new shipping channel a little west of the Sacramento River.

They say the bridge was built in 1939 and improved in 1970, but I don't know what kind of improvements were made unless it was to remove the motor from the swing mechanism.

According to the Bridgehunter, it is a Warren through truss center pivot swing span bridge. As I've mentioned before, swing spans are the least liked movable bridge since the pivot sits in the middle of the channel. Also this bridge allows less than 11 ft of vertical clearance above the river (and 14.8 ft of vertical clearance below the cross-bracing).

Yolo County, California Bridges: Sutter Slough Road Bridge by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.