In One Hoist, a Milestone Reached

New Wilson Bridge Opens for 1st Passage

By the time the cutter appeared yesterday morning, its outline just visible in the sunny haze over the Potomac, the new bridge was ready and waiting, its massive concrete decks already raised in greeting.

There would be no just-in-time raising on this occasion, the first time the drawbridge on the new Wilson Bridge provided passage to a tall vessel, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Seneca. The four leaves -- two on each side of the first of the two spans to be completed, weighing 2,000 tons each and stretching 155 feet when joined together -- had been raised Friday.

Bridge officials said the crews needed for a lifting -- which still involves some handiwork that won't be required once the bridge opens for traffic this summer -- don't work weekends. (The timing had the added benefit, of course, of avoiding the chance of a malfunction in view of the media cameras gathered on a small boat in the river.)

It was a momentous scene nonetheless and another signpost on the road to completion of the 7 1/2 mile-long, $2.43 billion project to replace the old Wilson Bridge, the 45-year-old span that was never intended to handle the nearly 200,000 vehicles that swarm across it daily. The first span of the new bridge, what eventually will be the outer loop of the Capital Beltway, is scheduled to open to all bridge traffic in June, and the second span will open to serve as the inner loop in mid-2008.

The new span is an impressive sight, its row of huge V-shaped piers dwarfing the spindly columns of the old bridge, managing, despite their solidity, to evoke the silhouette of seagulls in flight.

Without question, though, the structure's highlight is the drawbridge near the Virginia shore. Because the new bridge, at 78 feet, is taller than the old one, the draw span will be raised about 60 times a year -- mostly for cruise ships, tall ships and military vessels -- about a quarter as often as the old drawbridge. The bridge could have been built high enough to obviate the need for a draw span, but aesthetic and traffic concerns (a steeper incline means slower trucks) argued against it.

Here's what the $186 million for the draw spans buys: an engineering marvel in which precise balancing and the workings of a rack and pinion rotating around a trunnion, or pivot point, allow a 150-horsepower motor -- no more powerful than a compact car -- to drive the lifting and lowering of leaves that each have a counterweight of 2 million pounds. The leaves are designed to meet within a quarter of an inch for 75 years. It all will be operated from a small tower room convincingly designed to look like the bridge of a ship.

As intricate as the machinery is, seen from downstream, the leaves lifted to their 52-degree pinnacle look as simple and functional as the flippers on a pinball machine -- or, as project spokesman John Undeland prefers to think of it, "an official signaling touchdown."

That triumphant note was in order yesterday. The 98-foot-tall Seneca neared the bridge, its flags waving, several dozen guardsmen on deck. Traffic on the old bridge stopped, and its much more rudimentary span was raised. A member of the Seneca crew announced over the radio that the boat was bound for a visit to Old Town Alexandria.

And with that, the cutter passed beneath, under the new span and the old.