Wilson Bridge's Rubble Could Find Life in Bay

But Michael Baker, environmental manager for the Woodrow Wilson Bridge project, said that the fate of the old span was entirely left up to the contractors and that they had not decided what to do. They can either "crush up all the material and use it as an aggregate or take it down and make a fishing reef out of it," Baker said. "Those are the two major options, and it comes down to economics."

According to Baker's back-of-the-envelope calculations, the price of getting the material off the bottom of the Potomac after demolition, transporting it roughly 80 miles to Point Lookout or Point No Point and then bulldozing it into the bay is $500,000 to $1 million. And he cautioned that the resulting reef would be of modest size: "We're not talking about 1,000 acres of fisheries. It would be an acre and a half," he said. "That's a nice house for a lot of fish."

This type of work is not without precedent, even for the Wilson Bridge. Just north of the bridge is Fox Ferry Cove, where an old deck from the bridge, taken off in 1985, was dumped into the Potomac. Its ruins poke out over the surface of the water.

"It's a tremendous living example of a fish reef," Baker said. "I've seen boaters there every day."

In fact, the project was so successful in the eyes of fishermen who use it that they're upset the bridge won't be dumped in the Potomac.

"It bothers me that they're going to take this concrete out to the Chesapeake Bay when we have cost-saving uses for it on the Potomac River," said Ken Penrod, a fishing guide on the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. "I actually provided them with six different proposal ideas a year ago to use it like I used the other concrete for fish habitat and shoreline eroding habitat."

Baker said he had not heard of these proposals.

And besides, the bay really needs the help, Forrest said.

"The whole Chesapeake is changing," he said. "I won't say it's dying, but it's certainly stressed."