Whitby's Town Mayor, Councillor Linda Wild, has expressed her dismay that Whitby's historic Swing Bridge has failed again on Sunday 19 December.
The town council say the bridge has stuck trapping a charter boat bound for Scotland in the upper harbour, despite assurances from North Yorkshire County Council's Highways chiefs that the problems which beset the century old structure throughout the summer had been solved.
Speaking on Sunday, Councillor Wild said,
"The swing bridge is broken and will not open. They can’t repair it 'til Tuesday. It goes to show they haven’t fixed the issue at all; they just got lucky for a few months! I feel like we have been patted on the head and fobbed off in the hope that we would stop making a fuss.
"With less than a week to Christmas, here we are again. The town is split in two and the Harbour is paralysed. It's effectively delaying Christmas for some of the fishing community as they return home this week.
"It's just not acceptable.'
The bridge became stuck several times over the summer months with engineers recently saying they think the problem's over the summer were due to heat expansion, and they say laying a different colour road service might be the solution.
- RELATED STORIES : Whitby's Swing Bridge Could Change Colour to Fix Sticking Issue
In a report to councillors in November, county council Bridge Manager Phil Richardson explained the reasons behind one of the closures in July.
"In July the Bridge Manager attended a breakdown which was due to the failure of a limit switch on the East leaf of the bridge which indicated falsely that the leaf was closed and when the West leaf was closed it jammed at the centre of the bridge which left an open gap.
After consulting the contractor, Fairfield we unjammed the bridge and manually closed the East leaf and that allowed the West leaf to close then the engineer arrived on site and replaced the faulty limit switch and bridge was tested and put back into use. The bridge was operational and checked within an hour of the arrival of the engineer.
There was unfortunately disruption for the users for three hours while we unblocked the bridge leafs which had jammed. Fairfield’s are
currently looking into additional measures to ensure there is a secondary sensor or another way to ensure the bridge cannot be operated in this circumstance. There are numerous options and they are being evaluated before being implemented.Failures of this type cannot be predicted as the limit switches are checked during the services which are carried out twice a year. The electronic sensors that we have introduced on the bridge can be remotely checked and if they are not operating correctly they can be swapped easily for a new one. "
It has also emerged that there are no off the shelf plans available to replace Whitby's Swing Bridge.
After the bridge stopped working on a number of occasions over the summer, Local councillors questioned what would happen if the bridge were to become permanently broken.
County Council Bridge Manager Phil Robinson says they don't have a replacement plan for the bridge and would have to start from scratch if it failed.
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