Photo: WBZ NewsRadio
QUINCY, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — Quincy is taking its fight against the rebuilding of the Long Island Bridge to court.
The original bridge was built in 1950 to connect addiction treatment centers on Long Island in Boston Harbor to the mainland in Quincy. When the City of Boston deemed the bridge unsafe in 2014, they closed the facilities and tore down the bridge.
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In 2018, Boston officials announced they would rebuild the bridge and reopen the treatment centers, a project met with resistance from the City of Quincy every step of the way.
Last month, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection awarded a key permit to the City of Boston to allow construction plans to move ahead.
In a lawsuit filed in Suffolk Superior Court Thursday, the City of Quincy is asking a judge to overturn MassDEP's decision, alleging the agency approved plans to use the bridge's original concrete piers which "have deteriorated due to decades-long alkali-silica reaction ('ASR') and freeze-thaw conditions resulting from saltwater inundation and exposure in the marine environment for over 70 years."
The suit also alleges that the Boston Public Works Department "performed only limited testing on some (not all) of the concrete piers" and "did not test two of the three types of concrete present in the piers or any of the buried timber piles underlying the concrete piers to determine their structural integrity."
"The abutments that the City of Boston intends to use that exist now are almost a century old and falling into the ocean," Christopher Walker, chief of staff for Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch, told WBZ NewsRadio Friday. "The bridge design includes no provision for collision detection. Imagine after what we saw in Baltimore last year that any bridge would ever be built without any kind of collision protection."
Walker said the construction plans are environmentally unsound because they do not take rising sea levels into account.
In a statement to WBZ NewsRadio, a MassDEP spokesperson said, "MassDEP is currently reviewing the appeal filed by the City of Quincy with Suffolk Superior Court. We cannot comment further as this is pending litigation."
WBZ's Suzanne Sausville (@WBZSausville) reports.