Memorial Bridge

Wednesday, April 22, 2009—This just in: the details of Tuesday’s Save Our Bridges! Rally, scheduled for Noon on Tuesday, April 28, at John Paul Jones Park in Kittery. Thanks to Ben Porter, at PortsmouthBridges.com, for sending this. As of today, the weather prediction is for sunny weather and a high of 73 degrees. You can take this with a grain of salt, but it makes us feel better to hear what the weather service thinks. The Rally will take place at John Paul Jones Park, just across the street from Warren’s Lobster House in Kittery. We expect a sizable crowd, and there will be media …

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Wednesday, April 22—Two public meetings have been scheduled for next Monday, April 27, in Portsmouth and in Kittery, to inform the public about the now-underway study of the Memorial and Sarah Mildred Long bridges. The following information regarding the Maine-New Hampshire Connections study was released by Morris Communications on April 9. We should have posted it earlier. Sorry, we still don’t quite have the hang of this instant communications thing. Guess that comes from being a 252 year old paper-based lifeform. We shall aspire to do better. We would draw the reader’s attention to two things: (1) anyone wanting to ask questions must apparently bring …

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Friday, April 10, 2009—Save Our Bridges is online now! Ben Porter, the U.N.H. professor who conducted the recent survey of bridge use between Kittery, Maine and Portsmouth, New Hampshire (download a 1.3 MB pdf of the results by clicking here), has created a website dedicated to saving the two threatened bridges, the Memorial Bridge, and the Sarah Mildred Long (SML) Bridge. The new site lays out the problem: Memorial Bridge could be shut down in as little as 750 days, and the SML Bridge is also endangered. A page for each bridge lays out the specifics. Another page on the site shows the solution, and …

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Monday, April 6, 2009—An ad hoc collection of citizens from both sides of the Piscataqua have begun organizing to pressure Maine politicians and bureaucrats to preserve both the Memorial and Sarah Mildred Long bridges. A $1.3 million “Maine-New Hampshire Connections Study,” to “evaluate the long-term viability of the bridges connecting Kittery, Maine and Portsmouth, New Hampshire over the Piscataqua River” is now underway. A “public informational meeting will be scheduled for late April,” according to an official press release. The as-yet-unnamed citizens group is making plans to assure that HNTB Corp., the firm conducting the study, gets an earful. More details will be available very …

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Monday, March 2, 2009—We now have available for download a 1.3 MB pdf file of the results of Benjamin S. Porter’s Memorial Bridge Survey. So far as we know, the Maine and New Hampshire Departments of Transportation never took the trouble to ask people how important the bridge might be to them. UNH statistics instructor Porter did, though. His MBA students have analyzed the results and summarized them in this report. It appears to us that the results strongly favor rehabilitating the bridge. While we’re at it, we’ve also posted our paper of February 13, 2009 (Vol. CCLIII, No. 10).You can download a pdf of …

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Friday, February 6, 2009—We heard a hint that there might be some citizens hereabouts who want to save Memorial Bridge, home to the bronze eagle shown here. The officials in charge of such things seem ready to spend eighteen months and two million dollars studying the bridge, with an eye to scrapping it. Since we’re already in the process of trying to expand our distribution into Kittery, and since the loss of the bridge would represent an additional obstacle in that already formidable task, we have compiled a list of links to all the relevant news stories we could find on the topic of the …

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