Flooding's effects linger in detours

Julie Nardone has had it with detours. The stressed-out mother of three teenagers has been forced to travel circuitous routes from her Rowley home to get just about anywhere because two nearby bridges have been shut down for the past year.

Nardone's former six-minute dash to the grocery store has become a 14-minute commute. A 25-minute car pool to her younger daughter's lacrosse practice is now a 50-minute odyssey. And forget about the rides home from baby-sitting jobs for her 15-year-old daughter, Jenna. Many of her former customers aren't interested in schlepping 17 extra minutes, driving miles out of the way at the end of the night, when it used to be just over the bridge.

"It's a daily nightmare," said Nardone, 44. "I think everybody is just about maxed out with this."

Not that things are expected to ease anytime soon. Rowley's two closed bridges, the Dodge Street and the Taylor, are not slated to reopen until October 2009 at the soonest. A third bridge, over Batchelder Brook, has one lane open, but also is not scheduled to be fully rebuilt until 2009.

A year after a four-day deluge over last Mother's Day weekend swamped thousands of area homes and washed out many roads and bridges, many communities are still grappling with complex and costly rebuilding projects. Roughly $78.5 million in federal assistance and loans has been awarded statewide to help rebuild public infrastructure and to repair damaged homes and businesses, according to the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.

But that tab is climbing.

Not included in that calculation, for instance, is the reconstruction costs for the once heavily traveled Highland Street Bridge, also known as the Mill Road Bridge, which spans the Ipswich River between Hamilton and Ipswich. It has been closed since raging flood waters washed away a portion of the span's support system. The state Highway Department has agreed to fix it and to pay the estimated $2.5 million cost , said Steve Kenney, Hamilton's director of public works.

But at least one more Mother's Day will come and go before repair crews arrive. State engineers are still studying new technology for reconstructing the 19th-century stone bridge, Kenney said. Rebuilding is not even slated to start before the fall of 2008.

"It's probably our third most traveled road in town," Kenney said, "or was."

The closure has created headaches not only for Hamilton residents, but also for plenty of people from Ipswich and Rowley, who crossed the bridge on their way to the nearby Pingree School, a small, private day school in Hamilton. Now, many use a detour through Waldingfield Road, and that's created safety concerns among parents whose children are often behind the wheel, said Pingree School spokeswoman Samantha Drislane.

"That road is very narrow. It's very windy. There are a lot of blind turns and curves, and even if you are a seasoned, cautious driver, someone could be coming and be right in your lane, and that's always a cause of worry for parents," Drislane said.

Hamilton's bridge problems don't end there. It shares two other spans with Ipswich, the Winthrop Street and the Gardner Street bridges, which also were damaged and remain closed. Kenney is hoping to have both open by late summer. State and federal aid likely will cover 87.5 percent of those repairs, estimated at $270,000, with the two towns splitting the rest of the cost.

In Wenham, crews recently replaced three culverts that were washed out in the floods, after voters approved borrowing $1.8 million to fund the project. Now the town is hoping for at least an 80 percent federal reimbursement.

But in Amesbury, crews have postponed rebuilding eroded channel walls downtown along the Powow River until federal and state reimbursement is hashed out. The town received less than a third of the estimated $104,000 needed to fix the structure.

The Mother's Day flooding prompted a two-block evacuation in downtown Amesbury, where diners on the back deck of Scandia Restaurant have a prime view of the river. Scandia was one of about three dozen businesses that were forced to close for three days because officials feared the dam upriver would burst. It didn't. But the dramatic evacuation, combined with intense media attention, apparently made a lasting impression on many would-be customers, said Scandia owner Gordon Breidenbach.

"Ipswich was messed up. Haverhill was bad. But they focused on Amesbury. So people thought Amesbury must be a total mess," Breidenbach said. "Mother's Day is sort of your coming out party after a long winter, and we lost that. We were only closed for three days, but it had repercussions for eight or nine weeks."

In Haverhill, more than $1 million in repairs have been completed on a major sewer line that collapsed last Mother's Day weekend, sending hundreds of gallons of sewage into the Merrimack River. The city submitted a request for more than $2 million in federal assistance disaster relief, but is still haggling with federal officials over other portions of the bill, said Ted VanNahl, Mayor James Fiorentini's chief of staff.

Haverhill estimates it will cost roughly $1.2 million to remove debris and rebuild the embankment along two large sections of the Merrimack, where erosion has gotten so bad that roads and sewer lines beneath them could start crumbling. The areas were pummeled in last May's flooding, then pounded again during last month's Patriots Day northeaster. The sections weren't fixed because federal officials denied that portion of the city's request, VanNahl said.

"They take the position that they don't want to use [federal] money to rebuild things that may have partially degraded over time," he said.

As community leaders across the region continue delicate negotiations for federal and state flood aid, while also struggling to balance their tight municipal budgets, the watchword has become patience.

"We're progressing on this as fast as we can," said Lane Bourn, a Rowley selectman until his defeat Tuesday.

Residents on Rowley's west side raised quite a "bridge brouhaha" last fall, Bourn said, because it appeared nothing was being done to reopen the town's three closed bridges. What they didn't see, he said, was the behind-the-scenes negotiations with state and federal officials over disaster aid. To make sure the town receives every dime of federal reimbursement it can, local leaders are submitting all plans up front.

"It takes time to get environmental permitting," Bourn said. "We are crossing streams. We are dealing with wetlands. We are dealing with the Conservation Commission, the state Department of Environmental Protection, and the Army Corp of Engineers. There's an awful lot of time and review done to make sure we are doing it properly."

The upshot?

Nardone, the frazzled Rowley mom who lives between two of the town's closed bridges, expects to log a lot more miles on her year-old Ford Fiesta before she can put Rowley's bridge problems in her rear-view mirror.

Kay Lazar can be reached a klazar@globe.com.