Sarah Mildred Long Bridge
| Sarah Mildred Long Bridge | |
|---|---|
Sarah Mildred Long Bridge seen from Kittery, ME
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| Coordinates | 43°05′09″N 70°45′39″W / 43.0859°N 70.76091°WCoordinates: 43°05′09″N 70°45′39″W / 43.0859°N 70.76091°W |
| Carries | US 1 Bypass |
| Crosses | Piscataqua River |
| Locale | Portsmouth, NH, and Kittery, ME |
| Official name | Sarah Mildred Long Bridge |
| Maintained by | Maine-New Hampshire Interstate Bridge Authority |
| ID number | 021702510010800 |
| Characteristics | |
| Design | Steel Truss Lift Bridge |
| Total length | 854.7 m (2,804 ft) |
| Width | 9.1 m (29.9 ft) |
| Clearance above | 5.09 m (16.7 ft) |
| Clearance below | 41 m (134.5 ft) (Lift span open) |
| History | |
| Opened | 1940 |
| Closed | August 24, 2016 |
| Statistics | |
| Daily traffic | 14,000 (2014) 14,900 (1990) |
The Sarah Mildred Long Bridge was a lift bridge that carried the US 1 Bypass over the Piscataqua River between Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Kittery, Maine. The bridge was a double-deck truss bridge, with the US 1 Bypass road deck above and a railroad bed below.
The bridge featured two separate movable spans. While the main lift span and its towers was the primary moving feature, the second moving span was apparent only to water and rail traffic. On the north side of the bridge, the first non-trussed section of rail bed lifted up and moved south as a retractable bridge, coming to rest on top of the rail tracks inside the truss. This created a waterway large enough for most recreational boats to pass through without the need for interruption of automobile traffic on the bridge.
The bridge was scheduled to close in November 2016 and construction of a replacement, scheduled to open to traffic in September 2017, began in January 2015. A mechanical problem that would have cost $1 million to repair resulted in the early closure of the bridge on August 21, 2016.
Completed in 1940, the bridge is the second to carry motor vehicle traffic between Maine and New Hampshire at Portsmouth, and replaced a river crossing dating from 1822. The bridge was the direct result of the work of the Maine-New Hampshire Interstate Bridge Authority, which had been formed in 1937. The major goal of the bridge project was to relieve congestion in downtown Portsmouth and Kittery, where US 1 crossed the river via the Memorial Bridge, which had opened in 1923.
From 1960 until 1972, the bridge, along with the US 1 Bypass north of the Portsmouth Circle, filled a gap in Interstate 95, which had been designated along both the New Hampshire Turnpike and the Maine Turnpike. Although most of the bypass is four lanes wide, the bridge itself originally had only a three-lane roadbed, with traffic on the center lane switching direction depending on load (the bridge has since been reduced to just two lanes). This, combined with being a drawbridge, placed the bridge far below Interstate highway standards. The turnpikes, and therefore I-95 in the two states, did not directly connect until the opening of the Piscataqua River Bridge and the extensions of I-95 leading to it in the early 1970s.
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