Public Works' Mike Dorsey enjoys a view of the Quinnipiac River while overseeing bridge repairs Tuesday afternoon.
The Grand Avenue bridge got a new gear — and is gearing up to reopen not just to car travel, but to boat traffic as well.
The city had shut down the Quinnipiac River crossing between 8 a.m. through the afternoon both Monday and Tuesday to make repairs to allow the historic truss bridge to lift automatically, rather than manually, for boat passerby.
The historic swing bridge, built back in 1898 and more recently renovated in 2022, was last closed for a week in June of last year after a cracked gearbox left the bridge unable to lock while lifting and lowering itself to accommodate cars and boats traveling through Fair Haven and the Heights.
On Thursday, the engineering department received a gear they had custom ordered last summer from Alabama. That was the final piece necessary to rehab the rotating drum system which moves the bridge.
“Anytime a boat came down over the last six months, we had to manually lift up the bridge,” Chief Structural Engineer Zach Shapiro told the Independent at the scene Tuesday. To do that, bridge tenders had to go below the bridge and use a hydraulic jack to lift it about two inches so boats could pass through.
In order to fix the bridge so that it could automatically raise itself, City Engineer Giovanni Zinn said, contractors had to “disassemble and then reassemble” a series of end wedges that lock the bridge in place and insert the replacement gear and an internal bushing.
“This was all related to what happened last summer,” Zinn summed up. The bridge shouldn’t be closing to car traffic anytime in the foreseeable future, he said — except, of course, when a boater requests a raise.
Tuesday afternoon closure.
New HAven once manufactured everything. Now we have to wait almost a year and hope it is American made, rather than CHinese