Are the New I-35 Red River Bridges Too Low?

April 2025 was the wettest month on record for a ton of Oklahoma towns. Tulsa, OKC, Lawton, and Okemah, just to name the biggest shattered records for the month. It has led to some familiar problems, mainly flooding.

As the world has been able to survey the damages through social media, it has more than a few people wondering if the state has already wasted $460 million on the new I-35 bridges across the Red River.

Traffic has been a persistent problem across that particular interstate bridge for a long time, so the state started a big project to ease congestion with more lanes and new bridges last fall.

From the looks of it, a disappearing bridge is the project already doomed from the start?

Here's the video that shows the difference between the old bridges and the alleged new bridge during the flooding.

As you can see, the new bridge being built is completely underwater, and the comments in the video is full of people being super-sarcastic about it and the efficiency of Oklahoma.

Is that actually the new bridge though?

The reason I ask is that normally when states start replacing bridges, they'll typically build a temporary bridge to handle overflowing traffic in a project this large. Surely that's not it.

Add in the fact that the contract is to widen I-35 to three lanes for the first ten miles into the state, and isn't the project for a new six-lane bridge anyway? There has to be a reason a new two-lane bridge is being constructed well below the high water line.

That being said, this article tends to point at the submerged new bridge being the actual new bridge. If so, what a wasteful miscalculation. But hey, it's not government work if you don't have to do it twice, right?

If you're waiting for an answer, I don't have it. I've got a few emails off to various state agencies, but as you'd expect they're all busy trying to deal with what has transpired across the state for the last two weeks. I'll follow up later.