Carried traffic for 11 decades: Bridge gone at Great Falls

AMESVILLE — On Thursday morning, July 9, a handful of spectators stood in the First Light park and boat launch, across the Housatonic River from the Falls Village hydropower plant, and watched as the Amesville bridge was cut in two and lifted away.

The small but enthusiastic crowd included Salisbury First Selectman Curtis Rand; Mike McCabe from Falls Village and Mary Sullivan of Salisbury; Jeremy Dakin of Amesville; Lakeville Journal intern Mari Cullerton of North Canaan; a group of slightly confused recreational boaters; and one dog of uncertain lineage.

Susan Rand and George Kiefer of Salisbury rolled in just as workers began cutting the bridge in earnest.

The procedure was straightforward. Two gigantic cranes were positioned over each side of the bridge, and tension was applied.

Men with blow torches first cut the extraneous pieces of metal — of which there were many — and then settled in for the main event: cutting first the bottom of the bridge and then the top.

The bridge was cut in roughly a two-thirds/one-third division, with the larger portion remaining on the Amesville side.

The workers were still sitting on the top of the smaller side when the crane hoisted the larger section away.

More crew members, using ropes, helped guide the bridge section to rest on large wooden blocks.

It was all over in 10 minutes.

The crowd did its best to be raucous. Somebody suggested it would have been more fun to blow up the bridge on the Fourth of July. Nobody had much to say to that idea.

And one of the drivers of the recreational boating vans came up to complain that construction workers’ cars were blocking the exit to the park closest to the bridge.

Somebody — probably the same person who suggested blowing up the bridge — asked him why he didn’t just turn around in the spacious parking lot and go out the way he came in.

That ended that particular conversation, and the raucous crowd turned its attention back to the bridge.

The one-lane Amesville (or Water Street) bridge over the Housatonic River was closed in  April 2012.

The state had closed it temporarily at least twice before.

The two towns involved, Canaan (which is known to most people as Falls Village) and Salisbury, are working together to replace the bridge, with Salisbury in the lead role.

Under the federal-local bridge program, the federal government pays 80 percent and the towns 20 percent of the cost. The 20 percent is divided between the towns according to a formula based on the grand list of taxable property in each town — roughly a 75-25 percent split, with Salisbury taking on the larger amount.

The new bridge is supposed to be in place no later than Dec. 16. The process of closing the bridge, designing a replacement and navigating the state and federal bureaucracies has taken more than three years.

Still up in the air is the question of what color the new bridge will be. Rand had a book of color samples on Thursday, as the workers prepared to remove the bridge. 

“Hmm, how about ‘Safety Red’? Looks pretty bright,” he speculated.