Daily News from New York, New York • 636

128 SWaM VIAG Inga. BSI 2 DAILY NEWS Sunday, April 12, 1987 Spans will be in good repair Bold type denotes bridges under repair or slated for repair HEIGHTS BRIDGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE ALEXANDER HAMILTON BRIDGE BRONX McCOMES I BRIDGE 1458 BRIDGE ST. 2 Willis Bridge Ave Third Ave. Bridge Triborough Bridge QUEENS River MANHATTAN Hudson QUEENSSORO BRIDGE QueensLincoln Midtown Tunnel Tunnel B'KLYN East JERSEY NEW River Holland WILLIAMSBURG Tunnel BRIDGE MANHATTAN BRIDGE Brooklyn Battery BROOKLYN BRIDGE QUEENSBORO BRIDGE Total estimated cost $226 million Upper roadways being rebuilt. Lower roadways to Completion: late 1989 be rebuilt.

Start: late 1989 Completion: 1993 Source: New York State Dept. of Transportation THOMAS LYNN DAILY NEWS Bridge-fix project TRAFFIC FROM PAGE ONE city was sued by automobile and garage he said. "The court ruled that I couldn't close a whole bridge or tunnel to driveronly cars except in emer- gencies. "But," he added, "there may come a point in the 1990s when we can declare a traffic emergency." On the Williamsburg Bridge, the tricky part of changing the cables comes when the load is to be shifted from an old cable to a new one, said Schwartz. When that happens, all eight vehicle lanes and the tracks may very well be shut down for caution's sake, he said, emphasizing that he was not predicting that that would happen.

Main cables have never been changed on any suspension bridge, he said. Four old cables are to be replaced with two new ones of superior strength. City and state engineers are still working out a way to do it, and engineers from all over the world are watching with keen interest, he said. Through 1997 But probably not with as much interest as drivers, who make more than 108,000 trips across the Williamsburg Bridge on weekdays, or the 85,000 subway riders who do the same. Schwartz said that Brooklyn commuters will suffer the most until the end of the decade: Both the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridge reconstructions are expected to run 1 to 1997.

"Normal" street congestion is already eliminating such handy options as detouring through other streets, Schwartz said. In 1979, when the Williamsburg Bridge's outer roadways were under repair, traffic was rerouted along Delancey St. to the Manhattan Bridge, with a southbound lane changed to northbound. "We won't have that option this time, because Manhattan Bridge lanes will be closed," he said. The discovery that rust has eaten away more than of the steel on several anchors of a main cable has knocked back the Manhattan Bridge repair schedule by 18 months.

New anchorages, known as eye bars, have to be sunk in the concrete around the old bars. About half of the cable's metal strands will be shifted from corroded bars to new anchors or eye bars that 330024 a BRIDGE WORKER uses torch on Manhattan Bridge with Empire State Building in background. CARMINE DONOFRIO DAILY NEWS. Bridge men were Bridge By GUS DALLAS Daily News Staff Writer Bridge builders who spanned the East River at the turn of the century built well with the materials they had, never able to imagine the incredible mass and weight of traffic that would wreak havoc with their proud bridges in the future, according to Ernest Langjahr, the chief engineer for bridge design in the city's Department of Transportation. "The concrete they used was as good or better, compared to today's concrete," he said.

"It's quality control -look at the Appian Way," added John McTigue, the Transportation Department's assistant commissioner of engineering, referring to a still-existing Roman road built around 300 B.C. The three sat around a chart-littered conference table with George Zandalasini, the deputy director for engineering management of the department. "If anything, they overbuilt for safety," Zandalasini observed. "Steel is better today, because of alloys. We also have high-strength bolts of excellent quality.

We don't use rivets any more. You never knew whether a rivet was tight in the hole. We can test bolts to see if they're in tight." "'The builders didn't foresee how much salt water from salts spreading would leach through plontous concrete and corrode buried steel," Lang- jahr said. "They used ashes and sand in the old days. It didn't corrode steel, but it blocked drains and sewers.

Today, we have epoxy, to coat reinforcing "We're using epoxy paint on bridges to retard the saltwater soaking," Zandalasini said, and added wistfully, "But we'll never get watertight expansion joints." (Rubberized compounds fill gaps between the roadway joints and expand or shrink with temparature changes). "The East River bridges were the only ones the feds would go with on epoxy," Langjahr remarked. Years of benign neglect (read: no money!) and Scotchtape-and-twine repairs left the city's bridges seriously deteriorated after the city's.