Wallace Road to Reopen at Merrimack Line

Update (Wednesday, May 8, 1:30 p.m): The Wire Road bridge in Merrimack is schedule to open Wednesday afternoon to traffic. Access into Merrimack from Wallace Road in Bedford is now be possible.

Original Story:

The bridge over Baboosic Brook in Merrimack, near the Bedford Town line – where Wire becomes Wallace Road – is scheduled to re-open in the next couple days and has come in under budget and completed about three months early.

A new technology in bridge construction used for the first time in New Hampshire during Merrimack's latest bridge replacement project has helped the project be built in about 60 percent of the time allotted to it, Deputy Director of the Department of Public Work Kyle Fox said Monday. He said a few finishing touches need to be made, but the road will be re-opened by May 10 at the latest.

The new bridge, which replaces a failing bridge that was designed over a corrugated metal culvert, is a 62-foot NEXT beam bridge. NEXT, which stands for Northeast Extreme, is a company out of Middlebury, Vt.

Fox said the beams were cast in Vermont while work crews did the prep work, removing the old bridge, preparing the land and framework for the new bridge and then the beam were delivered Jan. 20. It shaved off weeks of time on a more traditional build where crews would install steel beams then lay the deck. With the NEXT beams, the deck is pre-cast into the beams off site.

Fox said this new bridge is expected to last 75 or more years as long as it is maintained properly and improved grading of the road done in preparation for the new bridge should prevent the water spillover across the road that washed it out during spring flooding events in 2006 and 2007.

Nancy Mayville, a municipal highway engineer who oversees the states bridge aid program said following an informal ribbon cutting Monday afternoon that the bridge was funded 80 percent by the bridge aid program, 20 percent by the town.

The state money comes from the highway fund, which has allotted $6.8 million a year to the bridge aid program since 1997.

The bridge, which was estimated at $832,000, and will finish approximately 2 percent under budget, would have been a much heavier price tag for the town without the bridge aid, which was started in 1994.

Currently there are 353 municipal red list bridges in New Hampshire, Mayville said, and another 270 classified as near red list. Mayville said the proposed increase to the gas tax in the state would allow more money to be earmarked for the bridge aid program since 1997, doubling that annual $6.8.

Even that, Mayville said, still is just a drop in the bucket for all the bridges that need attention.

"If people are thinking about the gas tax, wondering what's it going to, part of it is this," Mayville said.

The demand is so high for bridge assistance, Mayville said, towns that approach her with a new request are told that it probably won't make the list until 2022.

This is not Merrimack's first bridge to be reconstructed via the bridge aid fund and it would be the  last. Still in need of attention are a short span on McGaw Bridge Road, the bridge on Bedford Road and bridge on Manchester Street that Merrimack shares with the town of Nashua.

Watch the video above to see Fox talk about the length of the project and Town Council Chairman Finlay Rothhaus cuts the ribbon with councilors Dan Dwyer, Tom Mahon and David Yakuboff as well as some of the key players in the project.

The bridge was contracted by R.M. Piper of Plymouth and the designer was Quantum Construction Consultants of Concord.