MENDOCINO CO., 6/19/26 — The Hill Road crossing over Mill Creek that east-side Round Valley residents know as the Green Bridge gave out under a car on June 12. The people who depended on it face a long wait for a replacement. Mendocino County, which has been trying to replace the 1925 truss since 2012, says a new span is two to three years off — and it won’t build a temporary crossing.
Getting out of the valley now for affected residents means an extra 6.5 miles added to their trips. And with fire season starting, the closest crossing for Cal Fire’s heavy bulldozers is gone too.
On the evening of Friday, June 12, a man drove onto the bridge — the one-lane steel truss that has carried Hill Road over Mill Creek southeast of Covelo since 1925 — and the span dropped out from under him. His vehicle rolled onto its roof near the water. He climbed out with minor injuries.
Mill Creek was near its summer low, and the bridge didn’t wash out. It just stopped holding up a car.
Mendocino County had been trying to replace Bridge No. 10C0111 since 2012. Caltrans had determined the 101-year-old, single-lane, wood-deck truss to be structurally deficient, with a structural evaluation rating of 2 — the federal designation for a bridge “basically intolerable requiring high priority of replacement” — and the county set up a federally funded Highway Bridge Program project to put a two-lane span in its place, according to the county’s 2020 environmental study.
The 2020 study had the county building the bridge between March and November 2024. That never happened. Each step ran late, and the final step — Caltrans releasing the federal construction money — still wasn’t done when the span collapsed. Caltrans says the county was finishing paperwork to unlock the funds.
The county is “at the starting gate” for construction and wants to begin as soon as possible, Howard Dashiell, Mendocino County’s transportation director, wrote Wednesday, though he said the likely wait is still two to three years. The plan is to seek bids soon, with one contract covering both the debris removal and the new bridge.
“The county is finalizing a few remaining items before construction funding can be authorized,” said Manny Machado, Caltrans District 1 public information officer, which administers the federal bridge program. “Caltrans anticipates that funding will be approved by the end of this month, and the project can go to bid soon after.”
The federal government had set aside $2.73 million for the new bridge. But that money comes in stages — a piece for design, a piece for buying land, and the biggest piece for construction — and each piece is only released after the one before it is finished. By April 2021, only $869,000 had actually been released, according to a Caltrans status report. That covered the early work. The construction money was still locked when the bridge fell.
The old bridge was in poor shape but not closed. Dashiell said it was “deemed safe at the posting” — meaning it could still be used, as long as loads stayed under the limit: 10 tons for a two-axle truck, 14 tons for three axles, and 20 tons for the heaviest rigs. Federal inspectors had rated both the deck and the main structure “poor,” with the last inspection in August 2023.
Now the county has to get the wreck out of the creek. It has asked state and federal agencies for emergency permits to clear the debris from Mill Creek before winter rains, with the goal of finishing between Oct. 15 and Nov. 1.
No temporary crossing is planned. Dashiell said one would require private land, separate environmental permits and an annual removal to survive winter high water — all of it pulling time and money away from the permanent bridge.
“Because there are functional detours — albeit ‘one way in [and] out’ — many communities have such situations ongoing — this will be remedied in two to three years,” Machado wrote.
The detour adds about 6.5 miles to an east-side resident’s trip out of the valley — north on Hill Road, then west on East Lane to Highway 162, according to Mendocino County transportation department maps.
Fire season is here. The bridge’s weight limit had reportedly kept Cal Fire’s larger bulldozers — those with over-width blades — off the crossing. Now there’s no bridge at all. They must go the long way around, same as everyone else.
Round Valley Indian Tribes and the Round Valley Unified School District did not respond to requests for comment.