Span linking Bogota and Hackensack shut down due to structural issuesTuesday October 22, 2013, 9:07 PM
BY JIM NORMAN
STAFF WRITER
The Record
The 113-year-old Midtown Bridge, a heavily traveled link across the Hackensack River between Bogota and Hackensack, has been shut down because of structural issues, authorities said Tuesday.
MARKO GEORGIEV / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Bogota Borough Council President Tito Jackson in Hackensack by the Midtown Bridge, now closed to traffic. The bridge is likely to remain closed for at least 10 days while engineers decide the extent of the deterioration that was detected, said Tito Jackson, the Bogota borough council president who spotted the problem when he drove across the 315-foot span.Jackson said the bridge has long been slated for replacement, “but then we had trouble on the Cedar Lane bridge and that had to be limited to one lane in each direction, so that put the Midtown Bridge on hold.”
The bridge at the western end of Cedar Lane in Teaneck, actually called the Anderson Street Bridge, has had a 15-ton weight limit on it since September 2012 because of serious structural deficiencies.
As a result, about 400 buses that used the bridge each day have had to be detoured. In addition, the bridge has been reduced from two lanes to one in each direction.
Jackson said late last week he felt the Midtown Bridge “shaking as I drove across, so I parked my car and walked across and saw metal sticking up from the deck at both ends.”
Jackson, who also serves as Bogota’s Office of Emergency Management coordinator, said he reported his findings to the borough administrator, August Greiner, who called county engineers. The engineers ordered the steel truss bridge closed for inspection, Jackson said.
The closure puts extra pressure on the recently reopened Court Street Bridge to the south, which went through a complete rebuilding that took two years, and on the Anderson Street Bridge to the north.
“The Midtown Bridge took a beating for a couple of years when the Court Street Bridge was closed,” Jackson said. “We really kind of beat up the span.”
Jackson said he did not know how long the bridge might remain closed if extensive repairs are necessary. If the steel grid deck needs to be replaced, he said, it could take a long time.
“We don’t make that kind of decking locally,” he said. “We’d have to order it from a company in Ohio.”
In 1998, engineers from the county Department of Public Works closed the bridge for several weeks for emergency repairs after workers detected a problem with the structure's steel joints. Robert Mulder, a county engineer at the time, described the situation as "an ongoing problem that needs to be permanently fixed."
Although most people know it as the Midtown Bridge, the span’s name was formally changed in 1978 to the William C. Ryan Memorial Bridge, for a Marine Corps pilot from Bogota who was killed in Vietnam in 1969.
Email: norman@northjersey.com