Leenane bridge

Temporary bridge to reconnect Leenane by Friday next

Neill O’Neill

WORK is continuing to reconnect Leenane to the N59 Westport road after the only bridge into the village was swept away last week.
Galway County Council have confirmed that a new structure will be in place by Friday at the latest which will provide a temporary link across the Lahill river on the Westport to Clifden road, one of the busiest tourist routes in Ireland.
At present the only access into Leenane from the Westport side is by foot over a pedestrian bridge, but vehicular traffic will be able to enter and leave the village by the weekend, across a new single-lane bailey bridge which will be controlled by traffic lights. This 15-metre bridge will be made from steel and will be able to take heavy traffic such as tour buses and trucks.
An engineer currently working on the project told The Mayo News that this temporary structure could be in place for over a year as the process of building a permanent replacement will involve removing the remains of the old bridge, identifying a suitable site for a new bridge, and then designing and building it according to this location.
He added that there is an increasing likelihood that the new bridge will be in an entirely different location to the old one and that the possibility of building a new and separate pedestrian bridge was currently being examined.
Leenane resident Orla O’Toole said that businesses in the village, which are almost entirely dependent on tourists, were reporting a collapse in trade last Friday.
“On an average Friday morning you would easily have up to 18 buses passing through and stopping in Leenane,” she said, “but today we had maybe two come through from the Clifden side.”
Orla, whose family run the Sheep and Wool Centre in Leenane, added that the pubs and restaurants were also quiet as people were being advised to travel between Westport and Clifden via Cong, which makes them by-pass the village altogether.
She also told of one of her friends who is beating the extended commute by leaving a car she borrowed from someone in Westport on the Mayo side of the bridge and using it to travel to work in the morning while her own car is left in the village.
One Westport resident who works in Leenane told The Mayo News that an extra 90 minutes were added to her daily commute as a result of the collapse.
The bridge had carried up to 4,000 vehicles a day until it collapsed on Wednesday evening last around 5pm, after several hours of torrential rain brought landslides down the hills which surround Leenane. The Lahill River is in a channel at the base of the surrounding hills and acted like a funnel channelling an enormous volume of water and debris into one point, the force of which proved too much for the structure to take.
A large crack appeared in the centre of the road before the pillars under one of the arches swiftly gave way and the bridge collapsed. A pedestrian bridge which is attached to the structure was not destroyed and was secured by Thursday evening, allowing locals to cross the river on foot.
Several people who had parked in the car park on one side of the river and crossed into the village on foot returned some hours later to find themselves stranded and tour buses and people who travel between Connemara and Mayo on a daily basis found themselves with up to 80-mile detours.
The bridge in Leenane was originally built by renowned Scottish Engineer Alexander Nimmo in the 1820s. After a troubled infancy, during which it fell three times, it seemed Nimmo finally got a bridge built that would stand the tests of time. That time eventually ran out on last Wednesday evening.