New Nooksack River bridge to open Thursday

Tim Newcomb
Tribune assistant editor

  LYNDEN — It isn’t every day that new bridges over major rivers are opened to the public.
  Thursday will be one of those rare days.
  The new 685-ton steel through-truss bridge, the first of its kind in the county in 40 years, will open for traffic sometime Thursday morning, according to Washington State Department of Transportation spokesperson Dustin Terpening.
  Crews will finish striping the new lanes just south of the new River Road roundabout through Wednesday night and into Thursday morning. Whenever that work is done, traffic will be welcomed onto the bridge.
  And with 15 days to spare before the start of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, B.C., the promised completion time given by the DOT.
  “We’re pretty excited to open the bridge to drivers,” project engineer Chris Damitio said. “No other bridge like it has been built around here for 40 years. It’s been a massive undertaking and a lot of fun to be a part of.”
  The massive bridge sits just west of the current structure and is comprised of 200 individual truss sections, connected by 600 connection plates and various other steel pieces, and secured by more than 15,000 bolts.
  With the opening of the bridge, which will handle only southbound traffic, the older bridge will take on only northbound traffic.
  In addition to opening the bridge, crews will open another mile of Guide Meridian Road, between Wiser Lake and River roads, to four lanes.
  Crews expect to finish the Fishtrap Creek Bridge, north of the Nooksack River and south of Lynden, and open the highway to four lanes up to Lynden in early February, before the Olympics begin.
  Though the Guide Meridian will be functionally open in time for the Olympics, crews will return after the games are over to pave the final layer of asphalt between Ten Mile Road and Lynden and paint the new Nooksack River Bridge the same color as the old one.
  The last steel through-truss bridge in Whatcom County was built in 1971 on I-5 over the Nooksack River in Ferndale.
  Pictures of crews building the bridge from start to finish are available on the WSDOT’s Flickr site: www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/sets/72157618016037095/.
  The bridge is part of a larger $106.7 million project, funded by the 2003 gas tax, that will transform the Guide Meridian into a safer and less-congested, four-lane divided highway between Ten Mile Road and Lynden.
  More details can be found on the project Web page - www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/SR539/TenmileBorder/.
  E-mail Tim Newcomb at tim@lyndentribune.com.