No one anticipated that the capstone event of 2009 s Lake Champlain Quadricentennial would be the closing of the Champlain Bridge, though in retrospect it was bound to happen sometime in the near future.
Anyone who had seen pictures of its rusting riveted steel, plugged roadway drains, and other deferred maintenance knew there was a chance that the 1929 metal truss bridge would have to be replaced completely. What New York State s bridge inspectors didn t know (under a signed agreement, New York had responsibility for maintaining the bridge at Crown Point while Vermont takes care of the one in the north at Rouse s Point) was what lay beneath the summer s high water levels.
Once the lake level subsided, they checked the zone most likely to cause trouble with the pilings at the normal water level and found serious and advancing spalling. Cracks that test cores had shown to go five inches deep earlier in the year now went in 18 inches in at least two of the mid-lake concrete supports. The clincher, literally, was that the joints in the metal trusses meant to give the structure flexibility at times of high wind and water had locked up, meaning stresses were being transferred high and wide, threatening a catastrophic failure like that of the interstate bridge that linked Minneapolis and St Paul in Minnesota.
With the concurrence of Vermont officials, the New York State Department closed the bridge (which was already limited to one-lane traffic) at 1:30 pm on Friday, October 16 after saying at an October 8 meeting that it was safe for both car and truck traffic. They closed it as soon as possible with the full knowledge that doing so would strand workers at businesses on both sides of the lake, health caregivers at the Porter Medical Center, even Vermont farmers who had cows and fields in New York.
The closure is expected to be temporary, said the initial New York press release. No one since then has stood behind an expected date for the reopening. There is a viewpoint that 80 years is a good, long lifespan for a steel truss bridge.
But declaring the bridge itself to be temporary has run into the problem that it is a National Historic Monument. Technically, it employs a rare type of truss-and-deck structure, and its scenic value, mentioned several times at the October 8 meeting, has led to its inclusion in two Hollywood movies.
Last July the Champlain Bridge was reduced to one-way traffic. That was a headache, but most commuters view even that as "the good old days."
At that meeting, a UVM historic preservation program graduate student said there are many examples around the country of a steel bridge being rehabilitated while still carrying traffic.
There had been a meeting in Addison (where the bridge touches down at Chimney Point) on October 9 at which NYSDOT officials met with close to 200 people about a 60:40 Vermonter-to- Yorker ratio as part of the scoping phase of a federally mandated process that would eventuate in some sort of reconstruction or replacement starting in 2013. They said, and Vermont officials have repeatedly agreed, that there is no way out of this extended process and its draft findings and public hearings, because the informed guess cost of $50 million would be shared 10 percent by New York, 10 percent by Vermont, and 80 percent through the Federal Highway Administration.
Scoping starts with examining all possible alternatives, which in the case of the Crown Point-Chimney Point crossing included substituting ferry service for a bridge. Those at the October 8 meeting ridiculed the idea, both because a ferry wouldn t have enough carrying capacity especially for trucks and because of Lake Champlain s behavior in storms and wintertime. It would have to be an ice-breaking ferry, one resident remarked.
By October 21, the situation had pivoted. Numerous businesses told New York, Vermont and federal officials at a meeting in Middlebury that either the employee or employee and customer cutoff was threatening to close them without immediate relief. The Porter Medical Center, among those most seriously affected, was giving employees $12 a day to defray the tolls ($8 at Shoreham, even more at Charlotte) or the expense of a 100-mile drive through Whitehall at the south end of the lake.
Vermont Secretary of Transportation David Dill had declared a state Transportation Emergency the day before, a move that would not bring federal disaster aid, but would give VTrans flexibility in moving funds and personnel around in its budget.
In Middlebury, the word emergency showed its human face, with several human resources executives talking about tears on employees faces as they said they just couldn t afford to keep crossing from New York.
Over the summer, inspectors found that the condition of at least one pier had significantly eroded over the winter. When the lake level finally fell in the fall, they discovered the bridge was in even worse shape than they feared and immediately closed the 80-year old bridge. It's been featured in two Hollywood movies, including Harrison Ford's "What Lies Beneath."
But the Middlebury meeting, ably chaired by Middlebury Select Board chairman and construction company head John Tenny, wasn t allowed to drift into a woe-is-we weeping session. By the end, volunteerism, ingenuity, and a Dunkirk-like determination took the lead. Almost everyone realized that a short-term solution had merit in itself and that for that purpose, people ferry service supplemented by carpooling and public transit to homes and workplaces would be valuable in addition to longer-term vehicular ferry service.
VTrans wasn t waiting to learn the full extent of the bridge damage (not all of the 10 pairs of pilings had been inspected), but rather was researching and planning for a possible new ferry crossing near the bridge site.
The ferry company that runs the Charlotte, Burlington and Grand Isle services, and had closed Burlington for the winter, had become an ally. Addison County and Essex County transit heads were making active plans for busing, and the effort to identify parking places and potential carpoolers had begun. The community self-help efforts went as far as people talking about home stays to reduce the number of trips and enlisting privately owned pontoon boats to supplement the larger ferries. There were even officials in touch with the Coast Guard about how to keep a crossing open in the winter. (The fact that Lake Champlain is an international waterway, under Coast Guard supervision, had pretty much doomed the idea of a pontoon bridge, that and the thought of what such a bridge would be like with six- to eight-foot heavy weather waves.)
Jeff Provost, the owner of Dock Doctors in Ferrisburgh, said he knew how to extend docks into water deep enough (seven feet) so ferry propellers wouldn t get entangled, enabling a people ferry to operate very quickly. Brian Goodyear, the director of technical and engineering services at the Basin Harbor Club in Ferrisburgh, went one better. He said they had brought their 48-passenger-only pontoon boat back from winter storage and would run it through mid-December, three times each morning and three times in the late afternoon, to a dock in Westport.
Transportation for New York residents to the Westport Marina is being managed by Essex County Transportation. ACTR (Addison County Transit Resources) will provide two shuttle busses to transport passengers to Vergennes with stops at Country Home Products and Northland Job Corps.
The pontoon ferry will depart Westport at 6 am, 7 am and 8 am. Return trips will leave Basin Harbor at 6:30 am, 7:30 am, and 4 pm, 5 pm and 6 pm. An afternoon return from Westport was not posted as of press time. Cost for a round trip is $8; there is no charge for the ACTR shuttle into Vergennes. Commuters who need transportation beyond Vergennes will need to connect with a regularly scheduled ACTR bus.
A web site has been launched to provide commuters, businesses and the general public with updates on the bridge repair and transportation options for both New York and Vermont residents commuting between the states. www.crownpointbridgeupdates.com
The site is being managed by the Addison County Chamber of Commerce and will be updated regularly as more information becomes available. Daily updates have been requested from VTrans and NYSDOT and will be posted on this site.
During the meeting, there were statements from aides to Vermont s Congressional delegation that they were monitoring the situation daily and would do everything they could. Vermont Senate President Peter Shumlin said, I am here to apologize for himself and others in the Legislature who had put off dealing with the bridge until it was too late. This is nothing short of an outrage, he said.
One question was deemed out of order at the Middlebury session, which Tenny was meant to address immediate and local concerns. An unidentified speaker said that when the Champlain Bridge Commission transferred ownership of the bridge to the two states in 1987 and tolls were discontinued, there was a bridge maintenance trust fund, supposedly sufficient to keep the structure in good repair.
As I remember, he said, it was almost big enough to replace the whole bridge. What happened to that trust fund?
The question hung in the air, and perhaps will continue to do so longer the bridge itself.
Story and photos by Ed Barna. Ed Barna is a freelance writer for Vermont Business Magazine from Middlebury. Additional information courtesy of Addison County Chamber of Commerce. www.addisoncounty.com