by David Flint
A crew from Reed & Reed, Inc., the company engaged in installing ten wind turbines atop Brodie Mountain, was at the Pease Road bridge in Stephentown on Monday clearing out the remains of the reinforcements made to the bridge in August. The reinforcements were made to enable trucks carrying the tower sections, blades and other turbine parts to cross the Kinderhook Creek. Reed & Reed is leaving town now because a temporary court injunction has halted the Berkshire
Wind Project. In any case, only one more tower section is expected, and, by the time it arrives, the Route 22 bridge over the Kinderhook should be completed, enabling a more direct delivery route to Neil Gardner’s field where the parts are stored. The company hopes that the injunction will be lifted and the associated law suit regarding the Lanesboro portion of an access road will be settled in favor of the Berkshire Wind Power Cooperative, but the injunction has had the effect of ending installation work until next spring or summer. In the meantime the delivered parts will stay parked at Gardner’s field. On the mountain, four of the ten windmills can be seen erected but they are not yet functioning.
Gardner, who directed the work to temporarily restore the bridge, said he and Reed & Reed have removed all of the reinforcement and returned the bridge to the condition it was in previously. The bridge was red-flagged 15 years ago and shut down as unsafe. At that time the Town Board did not want to invest money in a new bridge. Gardner said that the bridge was used mainly by travelers from out of town heading to or from Jiminy Peak. This heavy traffic also required constant maintenance to the gravel road and the Town did not feel they had the resources to pave it. Gardner noted too that roadside litter from these travelers was also a big problem. He believes it would be costly to replace or restore the bridge for regular vehicular traffic as the concrete abutments as well as the steel beams are in very bad condition.
With the bridge obviously being used at least temporarily for very heavy traffic, the question arose at the September Town Board meeting why it couldn’t be added to the list of bridges to be fixed following last summer’s flooding. Town Supervisor Tom Sherman said he would look into it to see what would need to be done to get it open again.
Following that meeting Sherman met with two engineers from the State Department of Transportation who came out to inspect the bridge. Since the bridge still had the temporary reinforcement for the windmill traffic, the engineers said they were not able to do a thorough inspection, but from their cursory inspection they concluded that the bridge might not be fundamentally impaired, and they were not sure why it had been red-flagged. The engineers suggested that Sherman speak with officials in the NYSDOT Planning Group. Sherman said he intends to do that, will get all the facts and cost estimates and lay them out for townspeople to consider.