The future of Bastrop’s iconic Old Iron Bridge — the centerpiece of the city’s skyline — may be on the brink of “catastrophic failure,” according to Kimley-Horn, the engineering firm tasked with evaluating the bridge’s structural integrity.

As Kimley-Horn’s project manager Brian LaFoy presented the engineering study's findings before the Bastrop City Council on Tuesday night, he was asked to define catastrophic failure. His reply was candid: it means “the bridge falls into the river.”

Central to the bridge’s deficiency are the corroding gusset plates, or the thick plates of steel that fasten together intersecting steel beams and act like cornerstones to a truss bridge. A 2014 inspection of the bridge found that all of the gusset plates holding together Bastrop’s Old Iron Bridge suffered significant corrosion. But Kimley-Horn’s analysis found that the corrosion was much more serious than previously thought. Many of the plates were pockmarked with holes where corrosion had eaten all the way through the steel. It was upon that discovery that the city, at Kimley-Horn’s urging, abruptly shut down the bridge from pedestrian use in mid-November.

On Tuesday, LaFoy likened the danger the bridge faces to a 2007 incident in Minneapolis, Minn. when an interstate bridge plunged into the Mississippi River, killing more than a dozen people and injuring 145 others. It was its thinned and corroded gusset plates that the National Transportation Safety Board later blamed for its collapse.

“One of those connections failed, and the bridge came down,” LaFoy said.

The engineering firm’s $200,000 evaluation also found that the bridges’ steel beams are coated in a paint with significant lead levels.

“We knew that there was potentially lead on the bridge, just based on the age of it,” LaFoy said. “We just got our initial results in today from the testing lab, and there’s a significant amount more than what we saw in the previous report.”

Federal law allows paint coatings to have up to 1 percent of lead. LaFoy’s findings showed that the bridge’s paint contained 13 percent, which would require a costly and tedious lead-abatement stage. That process would require contractors to design and build something that would encapsulate the entire bridge while crews sandblast every square inch of the structure.

“We’ve now waited to the point where we don’t have any runway and this bridge is very close to not being saveable, even though it’s on the National Register and is an iconic landmark to how we identify Bastrop,” said Bastrop City Manager Lynda Humble.

The needed repairs have inflated the total projected cost of the bridge’s complete rehabilitation. City staff had budgeted $2 million to repair the bridge, financed through a $4.7 million bond the city issued in August. Now the project may cost as much as $5 million.

It will be the City Council’s responsibility to determine what level of structural strength they want to restore the bridge to. The bridge’s ability to support traffic is off the table. However, the possibility of turning the deck of the bridge into a pedestrian-only park is in the offing. Whether or not the bridge would be able to support throngs of people watching 4th of July fireworks, remains up in the air.

“This is art, this is science and a whole lotta luck,” Humble said. “Because we are now to a point where if we do nothing, this bridge must come down. And if we do nothing, it may come down on its own.”

Kimley-Horn will return to the city early next year to present the council with a menu of restoration options, each with its own price tag. Even deciding to demolish the bridge would require lead abatement and comes at a hefty cost.

“Doing nothing and letting it fall down has its own consequences — it doesn’t just go away,” said Bastrop Mayor Connie Schroeder.

The Old Iron Bridge was built in 1923 by the Kansas City Bridge Co. at a cost of $167,000. It was entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1990, before the construction of Loop 150′s modern bridge, which is used for vehicular traffic today. Originally built and owned by the Texas Department of Transportation, its ownership was transferred to the city in the early 1990’s.