On Tuesday of next week, explosive charges will be detonated to fragment the main span of the Jamestown Bridge.

01:00 AM EDT on Monday, April 3, 2006

BY ARTHUR GREGG SULZBERGER
Journal Staff Writer

It may have been the scariest stretch of road in the state -- 600 feet of slippery metal grating at the narrow peak of the Jamestown Bridge. Drivers lucky enough to get over it quickly sped along to a high rumbling whine. Those who braved one of the frequent traffic jams at the top of the bridge mostly remember the unimpeded view straight through the steel grates into the foreboding waters of Narragansett Bay 135 feet below.

The nerve-wracking Bay crossings were captured in the "Jamestowner's Prayer," an anonymous rhyme immortalized by a local church group in the form of a dashboard sticker:

Oh Lord please help me over this bridge

I get so nervous approaching the ridge

The mesh at the top makes me so queasy

I forget the salt air is so cool and breezy . . .

The mesh-grate summit of the old bridge -- a source of wonder for children and of terror for drivers for more than 50 years -- is already gone. Next week, the steel truss that crowns the old Jamestown Bridge and has dominated the Bay skyline for 66 years will follow.

On Tuesday, April 11, between 11 a.m. and noon, weather permitting, a controlled detonation of 350 explosive charges will send the towering center span of the bridge, which once claimed the distinction of being the longest in New England, clattering into the Bay.

A public viewing area will be set up at the University of Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay Campus, which sits about 3 miles from the old bridge. An engineer with the state Department of Transportation will be on hand to explain the demolition process and provide a countdown. Parking is limited and will be first come, first served, according to university officials.

A viewing center will also be set up in the Jamestown Philomenian Library.

Video of the demolition will be shown on the DOT's Web site, www.dot.ri.gov.

The long-postponed detonation might prove an anticlimactic end to the bridge, which was retired in 1992 when the adjacent Jamestown-Verrazzano Bridge opened. Years after failing to find a movie producer willing to pay the cost of blowing up the bridge, the DOT is trying to manage the expectations and imaginations of spectators, warning in its informational pamphlet that the demolition "does not produce large fireballs or large amounts of flying debris as one might see in a Hollywood movie."

Instead, the DOT hopes, the center span will simply break into 20-foot sections and fall.

"Gravity will take over," says Frank Corrao, a DOT engineer who is overseeing the project. The sound of the explosion should be comparable to the finale of a fireworks show or a thunderstorm, according to DOT officials.

The Jamestown-Verrazzano Bridge, which stands about 100 feet away, will be closed for about four hours on the day of the demolition between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. as a precaution, according to DOT. Eleven houses in Jamestown near the site will be evacuated. The Pell Bridge, linking Jamestown and Newport, will remain open.

The waters around the old bridge will be kept clear of boats during the demolition and for about six weeks after as work crews salvage the sections of the bridge .

The rest of the bridge will be taken down in two more major blasts -- each requiring bridge closings of about four hours -- and a series of smaller blasts. About six weeks after the first blast, a second detonation will take down most of the remaining decking. A third blast will take out the two concrete piers that support the central span. The smaller blasts will be conducted between July and October, each requiring a half-hour bridge closing.

If all goes according to plan -- a big if in the delay-plagued project -- by the end of the year the only sign of the bridge will be a flat stretch on the North Kingstown side of the West Passage that originally was designated for conversion into a fishing pier. Those plans have been dropped and the DOT plans to demolish that section later, said Corrao.

The effort to remove the decaying bridge progressed quickly in the last two years, thanks to $8 million in federal money secured by Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee. In September, the DOT awarded the demolition contract to Cashman Equipment Corp., of Boston, the low bidder. The $19.5-million price tag to take down the bridge is more than six times the $3 million cost of building it, in 1940.

Workers have removed the fabled steel grating at the top of the center span and much of the concrete deck and the north railing.

Over the weekend, workers were scheduled to begin cutting 350 notches in the steel where a total of 75 pounds of explosive will be placed to break the bridge into about 55 sections. Buoys and cables will be attached to the bridge sections to facilitate fishing them out of the Bay. The pieces will be cut up on barges.

The 6,000 tons of steel in the bridge was awarded to Cashman as part of the contract and will be recycled, said Corrao. The concrete will be dumped at three sites in Rhode Island waters for the creation of artificial reefs, Corrao said.

(Concrete from the bridge deck has already been dumped.) asulzber@projo.com / (401) 277-7405