Last bridge deck piece in place

A roughly 10-metre segment hung in the fog over Halifax Harbour on Sunday to fill the 46th and final gap in the decades-old MacDonald Bridge in time for tens of thousands of cars to cross the bridge this morning.

On most days since 2015, when the workday ended, construction on the Macdonald Bridge started. The 1.3-kilometre suspension bridge has been refitted piece by piece with almost an entirely new deck over the span of almost two years while still allowing people to commute between Halifax and the city’s sprawling suburbs from dawn to dark on weekdays.

The redecking phase of the “Big Lift” project on the Macdonald Bridge marked the second time that an entire suspended structure has been replaced while allowing about tens of thousands of crossings on an average workday since the redecking process was pioneered on the Lion’s Gate Bridge in Vancouver more than a decade ago, according to a spokesperson for the authority that manages the bridges in Halifax.

“People have described this as a once-in-a-lifetime kind of project,” said Alison MacDonald of Halifax Harbour Bridges.

“It’s an engineering feat, no doubt about it. We are essentially taking the bridge apart every weekend and then putting it back together for people to drive over the next morning.”

Since 2015, the bridge has been closed periodically on weekends while crews spliced the suspended structure into about 10 to 20-metre-long sections that were lowered onto trucks or barges in the harbour. New deck segments were swapped in with lifting gantry to close the hole.