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Decades of wear and poor maintenance finally took its toll last night, as the city shut the Williamsburg Bridge indefinitely to all subway and vehicular traffic because rusting cracks and holes had created the danger of collapse.
"It was a tortuous decision," Samuel Schwartz, the chief engineer of the city's Department of Transportation said after a day of inspections determined the bridge's structural integrity was so uncertain that it could not be kept opened another day.
The 85-year-old span, a key artery linking the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and normally used by 100,000 cars and trucks and 420 subway trains a day, was shut down to motor vehicle traffic at 9:30 p.m.
Pedestrians and bicyclists, however, will be allowed to use the bridge.
About 60 city and state inspectors will examine the bridge for three more weeks before officials decide whether to re-open the span, or parts of it.
After inspecting 4,500 of the bridge's 10,000 steel supports, engineers discovered severe corrosion on only 30, DOT officials said at a news conference at the foot of the bridge on the Manhattan side last night. But those findings, officials said, left the integrity of the uninspected supports in serious doubt.
"There's too much unkown," said Schwartz. "What we're more concerned about is what we don't know. There are 5,500 other steel members that have not been checked."
"This point was something we tried avoiding," he said. "We kept the roadways open as long as we could, but once we discovered cracks in every single roadway on the bridge, we had no alternative but to close it down. It is one year and one week since the Schoharie bridge collapse and we're not going to allow that to happen in New York City." Ten people were killed when a Thruway bridge west of Albany collapsed last year, plunging cars and trucks into the Schoharie Creek.
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