of higher bidders.

Folks over here have known for months it wouldn't make the completion date. All you have to do is compare the % progress to the % of time elapsed.

is this a TDOT project?

.. But it is convenient for this excuse to pop up.

A hammer? Really? Something doesn't sound right.

My guess is the piers are sound and it should be the quick and dirty pours done this year that need inspection. Anyone interested in a side bet there will be holes in the roadway in 5 years?

Or it will be an excuse to redo the whole bridge and cover over possibly shoddy work done this year.

It's so sad that several workers had to die to get this project to this point: half done and won't be finished soon.

It's like when the mechanic takes out your transmission and tells you that you'll have to get a new engine before he can put the tranny back in. Oh, and two other mechanics died while taking the transmission out.

The news gets worse:

(link...)

Maybe South Knoxville should just go ahead and secede.

A number of the businesses in South Knoxville have suffered greatly with the bridge being closed and causing a number of their customers to take other routes to get to and from South Knoxville. A number of businesses in South Knoxville have closed, a number have reconfigured their businesses, and certain projects like the condominium development on the river have become apartments, not for sale, just for rent.

I'm not sure all of the businesses between the southern edge of the Henley Bridge and John Sevier Highway will be there this time next year, with customer traffic patterns altered another eighteen months to two (2) years. Don't see any rapid redevelopment of the old Baptist Hospital site anytime until after the Henley Bridge reconstruction is completed.

We may see that the costs of construction of a new bridge was more economical than the ongoing attempts to restore and strengthen the old Henley Bridge and its pre-war construction and design.

It worries me that they want to add a "fourth side" to the piers. One of the big discussions over the bridge was its historic (and quite beautiful) appearance. TDOT promised not to mess with that.

Now I'm not so sure. I need more info.

And yeah, sokno is pretty much screwed until this gets finished.

It's the interior face of the piers that will get the extra wall. I don't think that's going to effect the overall appearance too much.
~m.

I know it's a silly thought and my knowledge of bridges is practically nil but I've wondered about the fact that the Henley was designed to stand on what was a pretty shallow river bed except for occasional periods of flooding. Twelve years later, the piers were permanently submerged in considerably deeper (and pretty nasty) water. I wonder if that could have caused underwater damage deep inside the bases of the piers.

Consider Cormac McCarthy's post apocalyptic novel "The Road".

The whole region has been decimated - unrecognizable really. But there remain two unmistakble landmarks. The narrator's boyhood home and that "tall concrete bridge".

Ironic, isn't it?

How about the city/county bring concerts, outdoor movies, outdoor plays, etc. and rotate at different locations in South Knoxville. To bring folks to the area and businesses.

from the get go, the best idea would have been to scuttle the whole bridge and erect a new one. A steel bridge can be very decorative if that was the only reason to keep Henley. Concrete decorations should be reserved for yard gnomes. The entire bridge that collapsed in Minnesota was replaced in less than a year, yet this rehad is pushing into yeat three. Wasted tax dollars and inconvience to the public and to the businesses that have borne the brunt of this fiasco.