The George C. King Bridge at St. Patrick’s Island has reopened after a temporary fix for a crack, but more work will be needed to fully repair it.
The bridge reopened Saturday afternoon, four days earlier than expected, after being closed since Aug. 17.
It closed after somebody noticed a crack underneath one of its southern corners, according to Michael Brown, president and CEO of the Calgary Municipal Land Corp.
“It made sense for us to just take a bit more caution,” said Brown of the decision to close the bridge. “It allowed us to evaluate it. What we’ve put in place now is a short-term solution that allowed us to reopen the bridge and then allows us to figure out what that long-term solution is going to look like.”
That short-term fix, which Brown described as a “Band-Aid” solution to the problem, cost $30,000. He said crews will have to return at some point to put more work in.
“If you go by the bridge, you’ll notice that there’s additional metal on it that ensures the safety of anybody that’s using the bridge, but in the long-term we’re going to need to go back and fix it in a more permanent manner,” Brown said. “The crack in itself is not one of those end-of-the-world cracks. It wasn’t that the bridge was going to collapse. It’s just it wasn’t as safe as we wanted it to be in the grand scheme of things.”
The bridge opened in 2014. It’s standard practice for the CMLC, which oversees the bridge, to conduct an inspection of major infrastructure in East Village every two years. The bridge was last inspected in 2016 during its final certification.
“Bridges, it’s not like doing a kitchen renovation where you hope it lasts 10 years,” Brown said. “When you build a bridge, it has to last a generation.”