Duxbury Doesn't Need to Replace the Power Point Bridge. It Just Needs to Replace the Pilings.
Peter Dalton has a plan to save the Powder Point Bridge. He was right when he said that the fiber wraps on the pilings would fail. Will the town listen to him now?
June 18, 2025 — With soft voices and a gentle manner, some engineers and public outreach folks from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) gave the town some bad news about the Powder Point Bridge replacement project.
Yes, they are willing to work with residents, but there are some conditions, mainly due to regulations that need to be met to maintain access to the $172+ million that has been allocated to the project.
There’s no design ready yet. They were just here to start a conversation and to establish a parameters.
This conversation comes after Duxbury Substack published potential designs of the bridge last fall, designs that were later published another local paper without any attribution for the original reporting done in this newsletter.
The good news is some of the more extreme designs, like the one below that proposed a causeway across most of the bay, are gone.
Now that the worst designs are a thing of the past, the engineers said that they wanted to design a context sensitive bridge, there were some clear hurdles to doing so.
Instead of our elegant narrow bridge, any new bridge would need a super-wide and super-ugly Complete Streets layout, at least 36-feet wide with a giant 12-foot wide share bike and pedestrian path.
What’s more, the new bridge would not be covered in wood. Instead they recommend concrete. It’s not clear if that’s MassDOT’s recommendation or what the town, wanting to save maintenance costs, told them to say. We can have a wood surface if we pay to maintain it.
There could be wooden railings but typical highway-style barriers would have to remain on either side of the roadway section of the bridge.
As kind as they were being, it often seemed like the MassDOT engineers were not giving the town the full story, whether that be on the process for gaining historical recognition for the bridge, the actual need to follow the Complete Streets and other protocols, or whether Duxbury could take responsibility for maintaining a wooden surface for the bridge.
That obfuscation came into full focus when Gaby MacNeil, a bridge engineer who grew up in Duxbury, told the audience that the town could ask for an exception from Complete Streets.
One of the MassDOT engineers then spoke up.
We can't pursue the exception for you. We can't come in here and say, hey, I have this exception. So please, if you want to by email, offer a suggestion of the type of exception you want us to start looking at. We can start looking at it.
In other words, the engineers do want to work with the town, but it appears they are constrained not only by regulations but by what they can tell town residents.
The question though is whether there are enough exceptions available to get the bridge Duxbury wants or whether it would be better to find an alternative funding source for an historic reconstruction of the bridge.
Peter Dalton’s Plan to Save the Bridge
If Duxbury can find a funding source, an historic reconstruction does appear within reach. As so often used to happen in the Duxbury of old, someone popped out of the crowd to offer a suggestion that was much better than anything on offer from local or state government.
Peter Dalton, who introduced himself as a member of the Shellfish Advisory Committee, suggested a plan for replacing the piling on the bridge with synthetic piles while retaining the superstructure of the bridge as is. Dalton is a Wentworth-trained weather-proofing consultant who previously advised the town that the fiberglass wraps on the bridge pilings would fail. They did.
I think the reason we are here tonight is because of the Clean Water Act that was passed in 1971, January 3rd by the 92nd US Congress.
Here Dalton is saying that we can no longer cover wooden pilings in creosote because it is said to leach dangerous chemicals into the water, mud, and sand. Creosote keeps wooden pilings from deteriorating in the water by preventing the borer and worm infestations he discusses next.
We have borer infestation here from the mud line of the pilings that I think were driven to refusal, and the borer infestation goes to the plus 2 tide mark for a full moon. That's where you see all the deterioration in the bridge.
I think if we were to remove the deteriorated piles at the mud line because I know below the mud line, I've done studies on this. Below the mud line, those pilings look like they were driven yesterday. If you take and use that existing piling as a caisson, and put and walk in new synthetic pilings to the underside of the cantilevered side of the bridge, with those 45 degree angles that are supporting them, that would work.
The bridge would not have to be destroyed. You could still use public access and everything else as each one of those deteriorated bore infestated piles were replaced.
I know that the Fiberwrap out of San Diego approached myself at my lab at MIT to do a mockup of the fiberglass jackets, which are outbound of the perimeter of the piling. I suggested at that time that that would not work, that a non-shrink route was being placed and wasn't being properly injected to the underside of the jackets, pushing the saltwater up and out. I also asked at that time to be...for those grout samples to 7, 14, and 28 days for strength. Those were a complete failure.
I think that we could use again the existing pilings that were driven to refusal. They look like they were driven yesterday. We can use those as a caisson and then build on top of those periodically. Budget every year for the ones that need to be replaced. Thank you.
The engineer from MassDOT said that would work if we were in the historic preservation space, but that it would not work with the current funding source. He also said there was merit to the proposal.
Dalton then said that there are worm and bore infestations throughout the country since the Clean Water Act was passed.
The engineer said he would give him a comprehensive answer to the question. Dalton said "we are doing studies on it too. I'd like to sit down with you and talk to you about if I could."
The bridge engineer refused to take him up on the offer, saying that he would get back to him in writing.
Some Historical Context
Peter Randall of Elm Street advocated for a similar approach. He said that his grandfather used to be in charge of the old bridge and that he would replace piling every year, keeping the bridge open the whole time.
Like Dalton, Randall wants to maintain the upper half of the bridge as it is. He also wanted to know if they did that, would the historic structure of the bridge be grandfathered in.
Sheila Lynch-Benttinen had some questions about whether the historical review of the bridge had been done properly. She wants a national review of the project so that MassDOT has to do more to respect the historic nature of the bridge. People who want a national review can write to the Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places.
MassDOT argued that the current requirement forces them to do context sensitive design, but Lynch-Benttinen argued that was not enough.
The state in Chatham wanted to do an asphalt roadway. The citizens wanted a wooden plank. The 106 designation and the citizens led to a wooden plank like the Kermit Bridge. And the state highway objected, but having National Historic Register eligibility, the context made the citizens. And as some have announced out in the hallway, this process, you would like to also do an asphalt bridge. Well, maybe some people in Duxbury want a wooden top bridge with current materials underneath. And a 106 National Historic Register designation would let that context of what the citizens want to be part of the process.
It should be noted that the Mitchell River Drawbridge, which did obtain the historical recognition than Lynch-Benttinen discussed, has a wooden surface and lacks many of the other ugly design items MassDOT proposes above.
Josh Cutler, owner of the Duxbury Clipper, former state representative, and current undersecretary of labor for the Commonwealth was there to take credit for getting funding for the project and to stand opposed to anyone who wanted to keep the bridge as it is.
The process for getting funding for the bridge actually kicked off after Jeff Lewis, former co-chair of the Highway Safety Committee, was visiting MassDOT and one of the staff told him that funding was available.
As with many issues facing Duxbury, the future of the bridge may hinge on whether we might get a better deal if the process can outlast the reign of Governor Maura Healey. She’s up for re-election in 2026, but the design for the bridge will not be done until 2027.
The Complete Streets program started under the Baker administration, but like everything else, it feels more extreme under Healey.
The MassDOT engineers appear extremely cooperative but hemmed in by regulations. We need to figure out if what they are offering will work for Duxbury.
Screenshots of the Presentation
The following slide is interesting because there are large areas of the Back River marked as containing rare and endangered species, but the state won’t tell us what they are. Apparently, one of them is bats.
