Bridge repair work will take longer
It will be another two to three months before the Ashokan Reservoir’s dividing weir bridge is reopened to continuous two-way traffic.
Adam Bosch, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, said the project to repair deteriorated concrete has proven to be more than four times larger than had been expected when work started in February 2015.
“The engineers anticipated that they would remove and replace about 35 yards of concrete when they began the dividing weir bridge rehab project,” Bosch wrote in an email. “Because they found additional bad concrete when they chipped through the surface, they ended up having to remove and replace about 150 yards . ... It became a much bigger job than expected.”
Costs for the project have risen from about $1 million to about $5 million, Bosch wrote.
The dividing weir bridge, which carries Reservoir Road over the Ashokan Reservoir dam that separates the east and west basins, originally was expected to reopen during summer 2015. Officials wrote that the effects of freezing and thawing had weakened the concrete, which led to state Department of Transportation concerns about the ability of the bridge to withstand the weight of two-way traffic.
Information was not immediately available on the volume of daily traffic over the bridge.
City officials have recently issued a request for proposals to design a replacement for the bridge, but are not certain when that project would begin.
“A project this large will take several years to design and then the construction needs to be bid out,” Bosch wrote. “So the actual work will probably start sometime 5-10 years from now. That’s why it was important that we focus on the existing bridge, rehabilitate it properly, and ensure it can safely carry traffic for another decade.”