By Petulia Clarke, Staff Reporter
St. Thomas residents viewing the Yallahs Bailey bridge which was washed away on May 24. - Norman Grindley /Staff Photographer
THE PROFERRED reasons the Bailey bridge at the Yallahs fording in western St. Thomas was washed away in the rains of Saturday, May 24, are numerous. Depending on who you talk to, you will get different opinions on how "the problem started" and how it "should have been solved". But one thing is certain, the tons and tons of flood waters which roiled the Yallahs River, transforming it into a raging irresistible force that Saturday, was too much for that, and most other, Bailey bridges.
The Bailey bridge had a 240-foot span.
In the view of one commentator, the area selected for erection of the Bailey bridge was "not the best".
But that "mistake aside", he said, the problem started with the actual erection of the bridge after the fording was washed out.
"The first problem is with the terrain; everyone knows that the entire area is a riverbed and you have to work with the river," he said.
He said that there should have been "reinforcements" in the riverbed, before erecting the bridge.
"But is like they think that after last year's rain nothing like that would happen again," he said.
What should have been done, he said, was for both ends of the bridge to be packed with boulders. "After a while, all the water that has no place else to run washed under the bridge and displace the boulders," he said.
Official reports were that the bridge collapsed where the abutment was washed out.
"If we had gone ahead and done all the river training work and other measures, it would have moved out of the realm of temporary and into permanent," said Vando Palmer, the National Works Agency's communications manager.
'TOURIST' ATTRACTION
The Yallahs fording seems on the way to becoming a 'tourist' attraction, with motorists going by on weekends to gawk at the site. The river, twice the normal size it was before the rains, is still murky but non-threatening for now, residents said.
The washed-out $16-million Bailey bridge, now a crumbled grey mass, sits at the bottom of a ravine. The reinforcement on one side was washed away; on the other, the bridge broke away from a concrete structure.
"What they do is they deal with one side good and leave the other weak," a bicycle rider said. "You have to deal with the side that the river coming from, you have to put something to face the water before it reach the bridge with full force - everybody know that."
It seems these days that everybody who goes to visit the Yallahs fording is an engineer, specialising in erecting Bailey bridges.
The Bailey bridge is said to have been invented in 1940 by Sir Donald Bailey of the Royal Engineers, to facilitate the movement of tanks, the heavily armoured military fighting vehicles which carry big guns and move on caterpillar tracks. These temporary bridges are made of prefabricated steel panels and are usually assembled on site.
