Scott Bridge Company is a family-owned bridge and heavy civil contractor based in Opelika, Alabama, and now in its fourth generation. The company dates its start to 1933 and has spent most of the years since building and restoring highway, railroad, marine and energy infrastructure across the Southeast. Services include bridge construction, design-build delivery and emergency response. Its recent Alabama work includes a new bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway in Gulf Shores. On Oct. 14, 2026, the Alabama Department of Transportation awarded Scott Bridge a $167 million contract, the lowest of three bids, to replace Tuscaloosa’s Woolsey Finnell Bridge over the Black Warrior River and widen about 1.5 miles of U.S. 82. Work is expected to start in early 2027 and could take up to four years.
About 85 percent of the bridges Scott Bridge Company builds sit over water. That single fact shapes most of how the company is equipped and how it trains.
The fleet runs to roughly 380 pieces of specialized heavy machinery, including cranes, floating barges and pile drivers, and equipment can be mobilized to a site by land or by water. Twenty-five or more bridge crews are active at a time. Six professional engineers sit on staff, reviewing designs for constructability before field work starts and talking directly with superintendents and owners once it does. A company fabrication shop lets machinists and welders build components on demand rather than waiting on a supplier.
The history is longer than the Opelika address suggests. I. Jud Scott, known as Cap’n Jud, formed Scott Construction Company in Thomasville, Georgia in 1933 with his oldest brother W. Fred Scott and W. A. Britton. During the Second World War the company built airport runways alongside its bridge, highway, culvert, dock and dam work. The Alabama entity split off as Scott Company, Inc. in 1957 and took the Scott Bridge name in 1965. Ike J. Scott III now leads it as president and chief executive with brothers Bill and David Scott.
More than 700 bridge construction and repair contracts have been completed since 1933, and several are firsts or near-firsts. The 1974 Kowaliga Bridge at Lake Martin used what were then the deepest cofferdams in the country. In 1983 the company delivered what it describes as the first Georgia DOT design-build bridge in the United States, on the Altamaha River. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005 it rebuilt roughly ten miles of railroad bridges, and in 2023 it built Brightline bascule bridges at Jupiter and Stuart, Florida. Power and dam work with Alabama Power and Georgia Power goes back decades and includes Mitchell Dam and Goat Rock Dam.
Six service lines are listed: bridge construction, design-build, emergency response, energy, marine and railroad. Emergency response is a real line rather than a courtesy, with the Katrina rebuild and a 2020 Three Mile Bridge response cited as examples.
Safety gets its own page and its own numbers. The company says its reportable incident rates run below 95 percent of U.S. contractors and that it consistently earns a below-average experience modifier rate. The program is built from task-focused job safety analysis, an incentive scheme, structured onboarding, OSHA 10-hour training and mentorship by veteran field builders.
