Nearly a dozen original bridges on Miami’s Venetian Causeway, which is just three years shy of celebrating its centennial anniversary, are set to be demolished and rebuilt.
The Miami Herald reports a $148 million plan by Miami-Dade County that was recently ratified by Florida and federal officials would demolish 11 bridges that are badly deteriorated and replace them with higher spans that would withstand rising seas and more potent storm surge.
County engineers say the new bridges will have an expected life span of 75 years and are required to replicate the look, scale, and feel of the old bridge.
Design work is expected to take until the spring of 2025 to complete before construction can begin. Construction is expected to take four years.
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Engineers said they are planning am approach of demolishing and building half of each bridge at a time to ensure mostly uninterrupted access across the causeway. Preservationists and historians had asked the county to consider saving the existing bridges and repairing and retrofitting them after they were last fully refurbished in the mid-1990s.
