A few weeks ago my dad sent me a link to an article about how he had resigned from the Upper Delaware Scenic Byway board. The article said that Glenn Pontier had “resigned over the controversy concerning construction of a new Pond Eddy Bridge.”
I was immediately intrigued and I called him to get the inside scoop. Our conversations all start out the same.
Me: “Hey Dad.”
Him: “Hey Zac.”
Me: “How’s it going?”
Him: (Chuckle) It’s going well.
Me: “What’s going on with the Pond Eddy Bridge?”
He told me that they were taking steps to tear down the Pond Eddy Bridge and replace it with a new bridge that would hold much more weight. “Pennsylvania has a policy to replace any bridge that doesn’t meet its modern standard of 40 tons,” he told me.
“It’s actually probably not a bad policy; most bridges that don’t meet modern standards probably should be replaced—but not all of them. If we replaced all of them, we’d have no covered bridges in Vermont.”
After a little bit of research, I learned that the Pond Eddy Bridge is one the last remaining petit-truss bridges in the Northeast; it was constructed in 1903 by the Oswego Bridge Company and it is listed on the New York State Register of Historic Places.
The bridge is one lane, with wooden beams below and a large steel support structure above. It stretches 521 feet across the Delaware River and connects the small community of Pond Eddy, PA to Route 97 and the world. It’s a beautiful old bridge.
The community of Pond Eddy is landlocked and fewer than a dozen people live there year round. The rest of the 23 parcels of land are weekend homes, hunting cabins and fishing shacks.
The Pond Eddy Bridge has been deemed deficient by the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) as well as by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), which control the bridge. Currently the only way to get emergency vehicles, deliveries and anything else into the community is over the bridge.
You get where this is going, right? The bridge either needs to be fixed or replaced. Right now, there is a plan in place to spend $12 million to tear down the original 1903 bridge and build a brand new one.
From what I understand, here’s where it gets a little bit complicated. They haven’t decided what kind of bridge they want to build, but in order to build any bridge they will first have to build a causeway to get equipment from one side to the other. Some methods for building the causeway have been discussed that could prevent passage by boats. This means that people rafting, canoeing or kayaking would have to get out and walk their vessels around the causeway.
Basically they are going to spend a bunch of money to build a temporary bridge, to build a permanent bridge, so that they can take down the existing bridge. It seems to me the thing to do is to spend the money fixing the bridge that is already there, which also just so happens to be a beautiful historic bridge.
Viewing an old map, it shows that there are two abandoned roads (one less than a mile, the other less than two miles) heading to the community of Pond Eddy (at least one used to go all the way). One could imagine that one of these roads could be extended to reach Pond Eddy.
After talking more about it with my dad, I started a petition at change.org and I’m going to try to help him and many others organize support to force PennDOT to change its replacement plan. Why not fix the bridge and build a road?
I think that we need to fight to maintain the character and beauty of our area. It’s tough to see how important things like the Pond Eddy Bridge are to the area but they make a monumental difference to the people who drive by everyday as well as the millions of people who have floated beneath it every summer.
Let’s save the bridge.