EAST BRADY, Clarion County - The new East Brady Bridge will be higher, longer and wider than the current bridge when it is finished in 2007.

The new bridge will be 32 feet high, 1,034 feet long and 41 feet wide with six-foot wide sidewalks.

There will be 521 cubic yards of concrete poured and more than 3.3 million pounds of steel used to build the new bridge about 300 feet downstream from the current one over the Allegheny River.

Those are some of the facts the public learned Tuesday night at an open house about the bridge at the East Brady High School Community Center. It was sponsored by the Engineering District 10 of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation with the cooperation of the Federal Highway Administration.

The meeting was to update residents on the bridge replacement project that is scheduled to begin construction in the spring.

Ken Rich, a facilitator for the project, said the new bridge would exit traffic onto Clarion Street. Kelly's Way, which is Route 68, and Water Street would be widened and would become two-way streets. The one-way square by Rackin's Drugstore and Nelson's Hardware would be eliminated.

"The project will leave some options open for local business owners for loading areas and additional parking," Rich said.

He added Kelly's Way from Clarion Street to the current bridge would be turned into a sidewalk improvement project.

Officials hope to begin construction of piers, abutments and wing walls next year. Ernie Earley, a member of the project's community advisory committee and the chief of the Sugar Creek Volunteer Fire Department, said the buoys in the water now mark the locations of where the piers will be.

Tuesday night's meeting was the second such event for the project. PennDOT hopes to complete the project plans and specifications and advertise for bids this winter so it can award construction contracts by next spring.

Earley hopes construction will have started by this time next year.

"A lot of the leg work is done and getting the mussels moved was a high priority," Earley said.

One of the main challenges in building the new bridge is what to do about the Northern Riffleshell and Clubshell mussels, two species of freshwater mussels that are on the federal endangered species list.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife led an effort to save the mussels in the river in the bridge project area.

The mussels were once abundant but the loss of habitat and water quality because of water impoundment, channelization, stream bank clearing and agriculture run off has reduced the species' populations by 95 percent.

Fish and wildlife officials collected the mussels and have started to breed them in captivity to promote an increase in population.

The animals will be reintroduced to the river once the bridge is completed in 2007 and in other streams and rivers in their historic range.

PennDOT said the river sections of the bridge would be built using barges because of the presence of the mussels.

Earley said he joined the community advisory committee to get involved with the project because he is the fire chief. He said he knows first hand how difficult it is to maneuver fire trucks through East Brady and across the current bridge into Bradys Bend.

"We (the CAC) were with the program from the beginning," Earley said. "We have been to all the meetings since 2000 and it was a fun process. It was fun to see how the state works and how our government works."

Earley said the project is on schedule, but he added officials still don't know how they will demolish the current bridge in 2007 after traffic is shifted to the new bridge.

For information on the project go online to

www.eastbradybridge.com.