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Crown Point Bridge CLOSED
- Thread starter noski
- Start date
Hawkshot99
Active member
Little full of ourselves are we?:razz:
drjeff
Well-known member
Actually very often folks tell me I'm full of something, and "myself" isn't what they say
:lol:
I'd be curious to read what they used to catch the debris. With VT being a fairly environmentally friendly state, I wouldn't think they'd just blow it up and let the debris sink to the bottom.
millerm277
Active member
According to what I've read, yup. And then they're going to gather it up off the bottom before April. Being so old, I'd figure there wasn't much that was "dangerous" there, just metal and concrete....neither of which are likely to be rare on the bottom of a lake.
WJenness
Active member
Before April?
Does the lake freeze in this area? I know the deepest parts of the lake don't freeze all that often, but I don't know where this bridge is.
-w
yes, it does freeze in that area. The only part of the lake that rarely freezes is the widest part off the coast of Burlington.
WJenness
Active member
Isn't that going to make getting the debris out prior to April rather difficult?
-w
One would think.
I'm actually surprised they demolished it. I would've figured they would've left it up as a walking bridge, re-routed the road and put up a new bridge beside it. That was what they did on route 16 going over the Piscataqua in Newington, NH. Also what they did more recently over the Penobscot Narrows in Maine.
WJenness
Active member
One of the articles I read said that it was in danger of toppling on its own (with or without traffic)... If true, that's a good reason to take it down.
-w
This has been pretty big news in VT on the local news channels. Last night, they showed footage of a woman at a public hearing who was highly agitated about the bridge closing...and rightfully so. People need to take an 80 mile detour now. It's just unreal that they let the bridge fall into such disrepair.
It's amazing how quickly it went from carrying traffic to being gone. If it was deteriorated so badly that they were afraid it would collapse on it's own you'd think it would have been closed a long time ago.
The dude who came on just after the woman in the video sounded like a tool...
WJenness
Active member
The state of bridge inspection / maintenance across our country is actually pretty scary from what I've read... Not enough hands and eyeballs (read: $$$) to do what really should be done. When it comes down to it, it's a lot easier to cut bridge inspections out of the budget than a special needs teacher at an inner city school... (or any other hart string type expenditure).
-w
Plowboy
Member
riverc0il
New member
When I lived in VT, VPR had tons of stories about how the state's bridges were mostly in various states of disrepair. Those were always scary news casts to listen to as I usually heard them in my car while driving over some of those same bridges.
Unfortunately, this is not unique to Vermont and we saw that huge bridge failure out in MN a year or two ago. Lots of bridges were built at the same time as our highways were built up and that infrastructure is reaching the need of serious repair or retirement.... at a time when budgets are tighter than ever and increasing taxes is political and suicide.
Geoff
Well-known member
When I lived in VT, VPR had tons of stories about how the state's bridges were mostly in various states of disrepair. Those were always scary news casts to listen to as I usually heard them in my car while driving over some of those same bridges.
Unfortunately, this is not unique to Vermont and we saw that huge bridge failure out in MN a year or two ago. Lots of bridges were built at the same time as our highways were built up and that infrastructure is reaching the need of serious repair or retirement.... at a time when budgets are tighter than ever and increasing taxes is political and suicide.
Vermont opted to spend big on social services rather than maintain their infrastructure. Their public policy doesn't seem to consider the economic impact of their tax policy or their allocation of those tax dollars. The Vermont side of the Connecticut River valley is an economic wasteland as businesses opted to move over the river to a more business-friendly New Hampshire. If you sit in Chittenden County where all the people live with the Canadian border to the north and a big long lake to the west, you probably don't care that the Crown Point Bridge doesn't exist or that places like White River Junction and Bellows Falls have become economic wastelands.
evantrentful
New member
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The main concern came over the bridge piers. They found huge deep cracks formed in the piers, far larger than imagined. The fear was that a strong broadside wind on the superstructure would cause enough weight shift to one side that the piers would give out, and the bridge topple over.
Ive got to imagine it would have cost huge money just to refurbish it enough to leave open for human traffic.
Its crazyyy that it was allowed to get that bad
from_the_NEK
Active member
The Crown Point bridge was actually supposed to be maintained by New York. But they don't have any money for fancy preventative maintenance either. They really let the bridge go downhill when they discontinued the toll 10 or 15 years ago. My guess is they knew the bridge was going to need a lot of work in the near future and didn't want a bunch of people asking where all the toll money was going when the subject of closing the bridge eventually came up. At least that is my little conspiracy theory :smile: Those tolls were probably buying NYC new subway cars instead of going toward a bridge repair/replacement fund anyway.
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