Beverly Hall-Whitaker Bridge Frustrations Aired On Capitol Hill

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Calling the proposed 13-year timeline to replace the deficient and condemned Beverly drawbridges "an embarrassment" U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton on Tuesday sought assurances from U.S. Army Corps of Engineers leadership that the replacement of the closed Hall-Whitaker Bridge and deficient Kernwood Bridge in Beverly could be expedited through express permitting and navigation of environmental issues threatening to force Ryal Side and other North Shore residents into a decade or more of traffic delays.

Speaking at the U.S. House Committee on Water Resources, Moulton called the timeline for reconstruction "beyond comprehension" but one that could become "a great success story" if the bridges can be replaced in a more timely fashion than what is currently being forecast.

"This is a bridge barely wider than the size of this room," Moulton said. "The Chinese would take it down in a night. And, yet, what we're being told is that it will take until 2027 just to get a temporary replacement. And 2035 for a final replacement.

"To be honest, I think that's an embarrassment. Onerous permitting requirements coupled with a complicated swing-span bridge design are apparently to blame. But it's not like we've never done any of these things in the past. We've been building swing-span bridges for hundreds of years."

The state Department of Transporation closed the Hall-Whitaker Bridge to vehicular traffic on an emergency basis in June 2022 — when it was behind the Kernwood Bridge on the state's timeline for replacement as a capital project — with state officials originally forecasting a timeline of 2035 before all bridge disruptions in the area would be completed.

Updated timelines have shaved about three years off that duration, but still do not even have a proposed temporary bridge at the Hall-Whitaker location in operation for about three years.

"We've done a site visit and we do understand the project," said Lieutenant General Scott Spellmon, Commanding General and Chief of Engineers, United States Army Corps of Engineers. "We've participated in a pre-application meeting that we hosted by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. "In fact, we had a meeting with the MassDOT secretary just last week. We're going to proactively complete our work once we have the completed application from the builders."

Beverly Mayor Mike Cahill and other elected local and state representatives had sought expedited permitting — especially when it came to environmental regulations that threatened to extend the project because of limited work that could be done when fish were spawning in the Danvers River.

Michael Connor, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, United States Department of the Army, said on Tuesday in response to another question on environmental regulations that a national regulation policy is being considered that would help cut through the challenges of each state and quicken the process, but that the threat of legal action brought in the name of protecting certain wildlife is an obstacle to getting projects fast-tracked.

"What's framed as an embarrassment could actually be a great success story showing that we can still do big things, even small things — small bridges — expeditiously," Moulton concluded on Tuesday. "When you realize that the root of the permitting problem is environmental regulations, and yet the proposal here is not to replace this bridge with one bridge, but literally to build two in two different locations — a temporary bridge and then a final bridge — it's hard to image that building two separate bridges is better for this river environment than ripping up one and putting down another.

"I hope we cannot lose the forest through the trees here and get this done quickly."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)