When a bridge dies: life on the infrastructure frontier

(Collin Campbell)

(Chimney Rock, VT - Transportation Nation) - Many people who live around Lake Champlain remember where they were when they got the news.

For Tim Kayhart, it was 2 p.m. on October 16th.  He was chopping corn in a field next to the Champlain Bridge in Addison, Vermont. A neighbor pulled over, walked up to him in the field and told him the span had just been closed for good; scheduled for demolition.  "It felt like a brick wall," Kayhart said.

Tim Kayhart and his brother have 1,7000 acres split between New York and Vermont. The livestock, feed and fertilizer they once shuttled over the bridge will now have to go by ferry across Lake Champlain.

Kayhart’s mother and father bought the dairy farm that he and his brother now work on in 1979.  Their collection of cows and a handful of red barns sits about half a mile from where a bridge used to be. As the business grew, the Kayharts shopped for more space in New York. The land was cheaper, the soil was better and they settled on a property four miles away, across the lake. The two farms came to work so well together that they trucked manure from the cows in Vermont to fertilize fields in New York.

On October 16, the New York State Department of Transportation said a recent inspection of piers that supported the bridge found they were no longer structurally sound.  The bridge would be closed immediately.  In that instant, the distance between Kayhart's farms went from four miles to 150 miles, via a long drive around the southern end of the lake. 

The Champlain Bridge carried around 3,000 cars a day.  But it's closure has hit more than just residents of this remote area on the eastern border of the Adirondack Park.  It has cast doubt on the ability of state engineers to diagnose problems, and plan for fund solutions when infrastructure fails.

State engineers in New York and Vermont had been planning to replace the 80-year old bridge in 2012. The revelation that it wouldn't make it that far came at a terrible time -- winter was coming, and setting up ferry service would by tough. The residents of rural Eastern New York -- long accustomed to working, shopping and going to the doctor across the lake in Vermont -- would have to get used to driving hundreds of extra miles, and working hours of extra travel time into their lives.

The Kayharts have had to send their most senior workers to the remote, New York side of the lake this winter.  If things went wrong, Tim Kayhart wanted someone who could think on his feet as workers waited hours for equipment or support when things go wrong. When it got cold enough for parts of Lake Champlain to freeze, they sent people across by snowmobile.

On February 1st, a free ferry service began operating, breaking ice and moving cars back and forth. The loading ramps are now strong enough to put milk trucks and small cargo loads on the boats. "The ferries, with the way they are now seem like they're running very efficient," said Kayhart. "I'm very happy with the way it is. But we're not harvesting crops either yet." In the summer, as crops mature, the Kayharts can make more than 20 trips across the lake, every day.

Up the road, Lisa Cloutier owns the Bridge Restaurant.

In October, she changed the name to the "No Bridge," after a friend from a local museum burst in to tell her the news. In January, she closed for the month. "Eighty percent of my business came from New York," she said. On Wednesday morning, she was open again, and more sanguine. About a third of her diner tables were occupied, one of them by a chatty food supplier who was taking orders for more heads of lettuce and breakfast sausage. From the window, you could watch the ferry deliver cars across the lake four times and hour.

Engineers maintain the Champlain bridge was unique: it was built poorly, and served for years beyond its normal life span, often in a limited capacity. By the time it was closed, they had reached a point where it didn't make sense to fix something so rapidly deteriorating. But as New York's state legislature hammers out leaner and leaner budgets and bridges get older, closures like these may not be so rare and so remote. "We don't have enough money to fund for the repairs for all the bridges that we have," Jim Boni, a project manager for New York State's DOT told North Country Public Radio. "It's just an epidemic."

New York State DOT's Chief Engineer, Robert Dennison

Gov. David Paterson’s proposed 2010-11 budget would cut local funding for state highways and bridges by 65 percent in some areas. Those budget decisions will come back to Dennison and the DOT, where they'll be forced to consider less maintenance, or service cuts if funding gets tight. "We end up shifting our resources to critical elements of the transportation system,” said Dennison. “Let me give you an example: we might not be able maintain the pavement surface on a lesser road so we can take that money and spend it on a bridge on a larger road. So you get involved in a trade-off situation where you're going to have to have the declination of service. Those are difficult decisions that we end up making."

The Champlain Bridge was never unsafe when drivers went across it, Dennison says.  But having to close it may remind people and politicians about how important funding things like bridges is.  As recently as the Pataki Administration, Albany was used to borrowing billions against the Highway and Bridge Trust Fund for other purposes.

Dennison is a personable man with decades of bridge engineering under his belt.  But he says it's tough for engineers to get the point across that some requests for infrastructure spending can't easily be ignored.  "Engineers are not good at advertising. We're not good at making our needs known," he said.  "We suffer as a profession of taking for granted that people should know this, and it doesn't help us."  -- Collin Campbell