Last week the contractors wrapping up work on the Old Sterling Highway in Anchor Point hit a snag in the process -- literally. The old bridge, well over a half-century in age, was replaced last year, but while being dismantled last week, it got hung up on a rock in the Anchor River.
KBBI’s Jay Barrett spoke with the Department of Transportation project manager Greg Shearer about the issue and next steps:
Shearer:
Kind of a long and short of it is, you know, we, last season we built the new bridge and this season they have to remove the old one, and finalize all the grading for the new bridge and the finalization of that site. Contractor originally had planned on doing the demolition of an old bridge during frozen conditions so we had the frozen river and we could work in place to remove the bridge.
And they tried starting that work here a couple weeks ago and, yeah, Mother Nature being as it is, decided that we weren't going to have frozen conditions at this time of season, so they had everything built up and ready to go for in-place demolition and the river thawed and started having some flooding conditions so they had to go to a plan B, which is, remove all of their platform work they had in place. And basically go to moving the bridge off the river onto the south abutment side and do the demolition off on the side there.
While doing the removal they ended up getting it jammed up against a large rock in the river, and so they tried to free it as best they could and got stuck and now just kind of working iterations of Plan B to get it freed and get her all wrapped up.
KBBI:
I'm gonna guess they're not the first people to get something snagged in the Anchor River.
Shearer:
I would say that, that is definitely true.
KBBI:
Give a timeline on how long the iterations of Plan B may, may take to work out?
Shearer:
That's the fun part of Plan Bs, and Plan Cs is, you never really know, as long as it works perfectly it shouldn't take much time at all. We're gonna have a crew mobilizing back on site and giving it another shot and if everything goes according to plan, our hope is to have it out and demoed here at the end of the week. If things work a little bit slower, Mother Nature doesn't cooperate, just takes a little bit extra.
