A Few Follow-Up Bridge Stories

Wednesday was another beautiful day here in Cowichan Bay – sunny and warm.  I spent the morning in the backyard mowing the lawn.  The leaves are falling now, but the grass is still growing, hope that stops soon.  Our pond waterfall pump stopped last night and when I checked it, the intake was plugged up with leaves, so that was an easy fix – Little Niagara is flowing again.

Victoria’s Blue Bridge May Survive After All

Way back on August 10th, I wrote that the day’s were numbered for Victoria’s 85 year old Blue Bridge as Victoria City Council gave approval-in-principle to replace it with a new bridge.  But, not so fast, a few obstacles have unexpectedly appeared and the old bridge may be spared after all.

This biggest obstacle to replacing the bridge, is as you might expect, funding.  The City had counted on one-third of the $65 million cost to be paid out of Federal Government infrastructure grants.  However, when grants were announced for B.C. municipalities last month, the Blue Bridge replacement was not on the list of approved grants!

Not to be deterred by mere millions, Victoria City Council went ahead, on September 24th, and selected a final design from the three options.  The winning bridge is a “single leaf rolling bascule” design that is about as far away in appearance from the old bridge as one can imagine.  Will it ever be built?  Who knows, but without Federal and Provincial funding assistance, it will be difficult.  I expect years and years of haggling myself.

Hood Canal Bridge Demolition Stopped

Another big project that has hit an insurmountable hurdle is a developer’s plan to dismantle the massive Hood Canal Bridge, bust up the concrete and rebar, barge the debris away for recycling as metal and aggregate, then sell the concrete pontoons for use as marinas, breakwaters, industrial decks or something like that.  It was only after the huge floating bridge was towed, in sections, to Cowichan Bay that the developer’s plans were dismantled instead of the floating bridge.  I wrote about this in one of my first blog entries way back on May 15th.

It turns out that a local citizens group, fearing ecological damage to the nearby Cowichan Estuary, brought attention to the fact that the planned demolition ran contrary to local zoning regulations – oops!!  The bridge sections can be moored in the bay, but not broken apart.  So the plan now is to keep the bridge sections in the bay over the winter and sell them in the spring.

So, it looks like it was 1 step forward and 2 steps back for both of these local ‘bridge’ projects.  The more things stay the same on the Island, the more us locals like it!