Fears of a collapse forcing closure of major road in Mount Vernon
MOUNT VERNON, N.Y. - Fears of a collapse are forcing the closure of a major road in Mount Vernon.
The mayor tells CBS2's Tony Aiello it's a local example of a national problem: crumbling infrastructure.
At street level, you can't see much of the problem, although the crumbling concrete gives a hint. But in a garage underneath Third Street in Mount Vernon, you can see beams supporting the road above are falling apart.
"Where the steel columns that were erected almost 100 years ago have now corroded and are causing, they're being compromised to the actual roadway," said DPW commissioner Damani Bush.
An old post card shows the road is a bridge over railway tracks abandoned in the 1930s.
Over the decades, the load rating for that stretch of Third Street has been lowered from 20 tons to three tons, a good-sized SUV.
"We are shutting the bridge because it's not just about enforcement. You should not even drive an SUV over this bridge right now, and so we are closing it," said Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard.
Everything is in place to shut a stretch of Third Avenue and Fulton Street starting Friday around noon for emergency repairs. It will mean weeks, if not months, of detours and driver inconvenience.
"In the beginning, we'll complain about it. But then afterwards we get used to it within two weeks," said business owner Charnay Phaire.
The mayor predicts we'll be seeing more of this.
"It's not just the city of Mount Vernon, we're not special or unique, but throughout the country. There are failing infrastructure throughout the country," Patterson-Howard said.
The city is looking to the federal infrastructure plan approved in 2021 for money to fix this and other issues coming down the road.