Installation of Girders for Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge on Highway 1

Slow, but steady progress is being made on the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge as crews work to put 900-ton girders in place months after the bridge was damaged beyond repair. The idea is to get 15 girder segments all the way across the canyon. Crews were more than a third of the way there Tuesday and are averaging about 50 feet per day, Caltrans said.

The bridge was demolished in March when winter storms forced a mudslide. The damage to the columns was so bad the bridge couldn’t be repaired.

“(It’s different) than the other bridge. This bridge is a single-span steel, not concrete and no columns because the slide is still underneath,” Susana Z. Cruz, with Caltrans, said.

After the demolition, a walking path was set up in hopes of reconnecting the north and south sides. The access trail become even more vital when the massive Mud Creek slide halted access from south.

“The bridge going out, the slides, it’s just hard to live a normal life sometimes,” Big Sur resident Layla Cosgrove said. The trail can be tough, not necessarily because of the distance, but because of the incline. When you consider that many people are carrying up groceries or medical supplies, it really can be a challenge. To make matters worse, with no road in or out some businesses on the south side had to let employees go.

‘It was like slow, slow business so a lot of people had to relocate,” said Abraham Curiel, a Big Sur resident. “I went to town to my friend’s place, crashed on his couch for a while and just lived over there and worked in town.”

It’s been a challenge for students too. With the bridge out, the one-hour commute to Monterey Peninsula College is a thing of the past.

When asked what his life would be like if the bridge was open, MPC student Miguel Torralba said, “I would just fly down. I mean my school starts at 1 p.m. so I leave at about 11 a.m, almost two hours before school.”

Caltrans says it is on schedule to open the bridge late next month but the girders are being pulled across Pfeiffer Canyon very slowly in 18-inch increments, so the opening could be pushed back to early October.