Report: bridge in good repair
MASSENA — The Grasse River footbridge might be more than a century old, but a team of professional engineers charged with giving it a bolt-by-bolt inspection recently said it is still in very good shape.
A preliminary estimate of the cost to upgrade and repair the aging structure came in at about $720,000 — well below the $1.1 million budgeted in the village's ongoing, grant-funded Aluminum Trail project.
Engineers from Greenman-Pederson Inc., an engineering firm with headquarters in Babylon, spent a week in September checking the 500-foot-long pedestrian span.
Village Administrator Everett E. Basford said the report was positive and generated six major recommendations for work that needs to be done to upgrade the structure: reshaping and repairing stone abutments and piers; removing and replacing bearings that help lend flexibility to the structure; making minor repairs to trusses, braces and other steel components; removing a steel plate walkway and railing and installing a new precast concrete slab walkway and standard bicycle railing; replacing two utility poles and installing overhead lighting at two major points along the walkway, and clearing brush and foliage around the structure.
When those repairs are completed, the engineers said, the bridge would be sturdy enough to accommodate the Department of Public Works' sidewalk plow, which would be used to clear snow in the wintertime.
"All the indications we're getting from the engineers is that the bridge is in very good condition," Mr. Basford said. "The biggest thing is that it's never had salt on it, which has really helped keep it up."
Local officials have been able to glean from sparse records from that time that the bridge originally was built by Alcoa in about 1897.
Fixing the footbridge would be the first step in the two-phase, $1.5 million Aluminum Trail project, which aims to connect walking and biking trails along the St. Lawrence River with the footbridge and additional trails leading through Massena. The first phase will focus on the bridge, while the second phase will involve installing the trails.
The project received a $1.2 million Transportation Enhancement Grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation in the fall of 2006 and must be completed by the fall of 2011. To obtain the grant funds, the community must put up the $300,000 local match, either through a cash contribution or through in-kind services through the DPW or the Massena Electric Department, which had in the past offered to install the necessary streetlights on the footbridge as a donation.
Village officials had raised concerns about the condition of the footbridge, questioning whether the grant funding would be adequate to cover the costs of repairing it, as well as the size of the local match. But some have suggested a $350,000 chunk of money set aside for another grant project — building a dozen homes at the site of the former Lincoln School — has been freed up now that that project has been abandoned.
With the news that the repairs to the bridge will fall well within the scope of the grants, village officials say they're willing to continue moving forward with the project.
