$2.2 million East Street Bridge repair could take more than a year

June 2, 2016 | Chris Goudreau
cgoudreau@thereminder.com

WILBRAHAM – A $2.2 million state funded project to repair East Street Bridge, a major crossroads for several local communities such as Ludlow and Palmer, is tentatively set to go out to bid June 17.

Department of Public Works (DPW) Director Edmond Miga Jr. told Reminder Publications the project could start sometime late summer and would likely take more than a year to complete.  

“What will happen is [the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT)] will award the bid, the construction will start at the end of this summer, and then I would expect ... that on sometime that they’ll have to shut down for winter and then start back up in the spring,” he explained.

Miga said a major portion of the project would entail rehabilitating the bridge abutment on the Wilbraham side.

“They’re actually going to have to lift the bridge and support it from underneath and redo that abutment over because that’s why the bridge was going into failure,” he explained. “They’re going to put all new railing on it and of course a new surface. There’s a large hole in the deck now that needs to be repaired.”

He added the bridge’s expansion joints would be replaced and an abutment near the water would be reinforced.

“On the Ludlow side, there’s some abutment work that needs to be done there,” Miga noted.

Miga said the project is a long time coming.

“There’s been a lot of preparation work that needed to be done,” he added. “I don’t think that in the beginning they realized the extent of the damage that had occurred to the bridge.”

Miga said state Sen. Eric Lesser’s chief of staff Michael Clark was “instrumental” in getting the East Street Bridge move up on MassDOT’s list of bridge projects.

The project wasn’t initially slated for finding until fiscal year 2020.

“It was originally $1 million that they had secured for the project and then after the engineers went out and reevaluated it, they recognized that there was a lot more damage to this bridge then was originally shown. They saw that they needed to spend a lot more on the project,” Miga said.

Got a comment about this story? Go to http://speakout.thereminder.com and let us know.

Share this: