Several weeks ago the Johnson Street Bridge critics were at it, raising the alarm over potential delays to the project associated with delicate work to relocate a secure data Telus duct underground in the pathway in the bridge.

Days after the election, and I’ve cleared out my council office, but I was getting the emails up until I turned in my blackberry, and the same critics were now asking council to delay the project to reconsider rail on the bridge. More than a genuine concern about rail on the bridge, I think it has been an effort to put a stick in the spokes of the project in an ongoing effort to frustrate, delay and or derail the project altogether.

Over the course of the campaign against the new bridge, (and it has always been about saving the old bridge as a museum piece more so than the functionality of the crossing), the blue bridge preservation society has variously tried to attach themselves to the fiscal conservatives, the cycling community, heritage interests, those whose other pet projects might be threatened, and anyone else opposed to the last Mayor and Council. The project is well advanced, even if there is little evidence on the ground, but it will be interesting to see how the new council deals with coming phases of the project. Certainly Councillor Isitt’s comments to the pres after the election give pause for concern – he opined that council’s uncritical acceptance of staff advice on key issues (particularly the bridge), were responsible in some way for his election. It will be worth watching where or how he articulates that skepticism on the project as reports or decision points come to council.

Heritage buffs have been the most reliable of alliances, since they alone had a truly legitimate and focused interested in preserving the old bridge. Even the heritage elements, however, would prove as much to be the undoing of the bridge on technical issues. This heritage is very old and the weather is cruel, especially in a salt water environment that accelerates corrosion. Rust ever seeps between the plates of steel tacked together by rivet heads by the thousands, unable to contain the attendant coral of detritus wedging into the superstructure. No conceivable maintenance strategy could arrest the disintegration that would condemn the bridge to the recyclers.

The engineer who conducted the peer review, a heritage advocate of much repute, showed me one of the afflicted members, poking a screwdriver through a section he said carried about 25 tons of load, and swirling the blade around to create a hole that at least a child’s leg could fit through. While on the surface the bridge looks like rust has broken out like measles on a two year old, what the paint is really disguising is a rust sandwich with layer upon layer of corroded steel holding together the structure at the joints. At any one of those, mostly on the rail bridge, the risk of critical and catastrophic failure has been that much more acute, and while to all appearances, there is no danger of failure, a break at any one of a number of points could plausibly trigger a chain of events that would collapse the bridge and drop the counterweight onto the deck below. Who knows where that would lead across such a complex and integrated amalgam of structure.