FOUKE, Ark. -- Miller County residents who use County Road 10 will now be able to continue to do so.
Recently, county officials replaced and re-opened a road bridge on County Road 10, just a few miles east of Fouke.
Prior to this, the bridge crossing, which has been open for at least a week now, had to be closed for at least four months, for replacement and widening.
"Work on rebuilding the bridge started back in September and October and now we have a totally new bridge replacement," said Miller County Judge Cathy Harrison. "The older bridge had been here for decades or longer."
Harrison added that the county received $280,000 in Federal Emergency Management Agency Hazardous Mitigation funds to replace the bridge. This amount had to be matched with about $70,000 in county funds.
"We had to close the bridge this past summer after bridge inspectors notified us about the bridge's structural condition," she said. "Work on replacing it took about six weeks and now it should last a hundred years."
Besides replacing the bridge on County Road 10, County officials also used $78,000 in FEMA grant funds earlier this year to raise about a 300-foot length of County Road 29, a few miles north of Fouke.
Harrison said the FEMA finance helped the county place seven culverts underneath the raised portion of County Road 29 in order to allow high flood waters to flow under this section of road, rather then over it.
Along with completing these two road and bridge projects this year, Harrison added the same type of FEMA funds received last year, aided the county in replacing another Fouke area bridge on County Road 41. This bridge work also received about $280,000 in FEMA funds.
One other bridge, this one on County Road 43, roughly a mile or two just northwest of Fouke, also had to be replaced last year at a cost of $300,000 -- strictly with county funds, Harrison said.