New Ohio River bridge at Portsmouth

Someday soon I'll have to pack my cameras and get on down to Portsmouth, Ohio. The Ohio Department of Transportation says it should have the new bridge at downtown Portsmouth ready for traffic by the end of October. However, ODOT has yet to set a date for opening the bridge.

I haven't been down there for about two years. At the time, one tower was going up on the new cable-stay bridge.

Likewise, I'll have to get up to Pomeroy, Ohio, soon to see the new cable-stay bridge being built there. The last time I was there was about 18 months ago, when my older son, Joey, was working on a fifth-grade social studies fair project about bridges of the Ohio River. Speaking of which, he didn't win at his school, but he learned a lot about bridges and local geography in the process of preparing his display. I did the driving, I supplied some background information and I typed and printed out the title of his display, but he did everything else himself, from arranging photos to writing copyblocks about the various bridges to deciding what colors to use. The morning I dropped him off at school, I saw parents carrying some displays that simply astounded me, because I didn't know that many kids to design and assemble such elaborate efforts. (A co-worker with a son the same age as Joey but at a different school noticed the same thing when he took his son's display to school).

Back on topic: Portsmouth and Pomeroy are getting cable-stay bridges, but that design was too expensive for the new bridge planned for Ironton. That's not a complaint, just an observation.