SKINNERS FALLS, NY AND MILANVILLE, PA — While cultural resource agencies and local advocates have questions about the process by which the Skinners Falls Bridge came to have one foot in the grave, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) defends the path which led it there as the only one it could have taken. 

In 2019, the PennDOT closed the historic Skinners Falls Bridge to vehicle travel, claiming the bridge to be no longer safe for cars and trucks to cross. 

Now, over five years later, the bridge has deteriorated to the point where it can no longer be preserved as a historic and culturally significant structure, according to PennDOT, which plans to demolish it with explosive charges. 

It’s an outcome that community members and cultural resources agencies have decried—and one PennDOT defends as the end point of a process it conducted to the best of its abilities. 

“When the bridge was closed, we immediately started to look at options,” Rich Roman, PennDOT District 4 executive, told the River Reporter. “And unfortunately, based on laws and regulations, there are procedures that you have to follow… Unfortunately, it takes time.”

“We did everything we could within reason, within the process, but unfortunately during that time the bridge started to deteriorate beyond repair and saving,” Roman said. 

The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), which oversees the project’s historic review on the federal level, does not share Roman’s view. ACHP wrote that, “The poor condition of the bridge has been known for at least five years, and it is unclear whether there was action that could have been taken that would have prevented its deterioration to the point of potential collapse.”

Historic preservation regulations identify “neglect of a property which causes its deterioration as an adverse effect itself,” the ACHP wrote. 

The Damascus Citizens for Sustainability (DCS), an advocate group that has consistently pressed for the bridge’s preservation as a historic structure, believes it is clear that there is more PennDOT could have done. 

“PennDOT ignored well-known and well-documented critical repair needs year after year,” DCS wrote in a January 3 letter to project stakeholders. “The reason the bridge is in the condition it is today is because PennDOT has allowed it to fall apart.”

Rehabilitation alternatives

In the bridge’s  current condition, PennDOT has presented demolition as the only path forward, removing any possibility of rehabilitating the historic structure. 

DCS believes a rehabilitation option is still possible. A report from the October 2024 inspection of the bridge “still identifies a path forward for bridge rehabilitation in the form of the work PennDOT has sloughed off for decades,” it wrote. 

The River Reporter previously reported that the October bridge inspection does not make reference to any need to destroy the bridge. The inspection identifies $261,290 worth of “Priority 1” repairs to be conducted on the bridge within the following six months. 

Roman said the bridge inspection reports wouldn’t mention the need to destroy the bridge, because the report merely provides data which PennDOT uses to separately form a conclusion; the reports aren’t the place those conclusions would be drawn. 

When PennDOT announced in November it would dismantle the Skinners Falls Bridge, it started work on a plan that would do so while leaving open the option of historic preservation, Roman said. However, “After a while of analysis between the contractor, our consultant and PennDOT, there was a very strong concern that, once we went to go lift the bridge up, because of the small, slender truss [and because] sections of it, portions of it [were] falling off and deteriorating… it may collapse on its own,” he said. 

That fear of collapse wouldn’t preclude PennDOT from putting temporary shoring in place; PennDOT’s December 17 analysis of engineering alternatives said that further deterioration of the bridge’s substructure could be restrained through “an engineered temporary measure.” However, it would just push off the problem, not solve it.

“To rehab the bridge, you still have to take it off the abutment and the piers and lift it… and that [has] a risk of collapse,” Roman said. For this reason, PennDOT believes rehabilitation is no longer possible. 

Barbara Arrindell, DCS director, has previously told the River Reporter any restoration of the bridge would require it to be disassembled. 

Next steps

PennDOT needs a host of approvals from state and federal agencies to toll the bridge’s death knell. It secured an emergency declaration from Gov. Josh Shapiro and is asking for expedited approval processes on the strength of that declaration. 

It’s currently working its way through the process of getting those approvals, making sure its i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed, said Roman. 

National Park Service (NPS) Superintendent Lindsey Kurnath said that her office is working to conduct its own independent review and issue PennDOT a permit “as expeditiously as possible.”

However, the view from NPS leadership in Washington is, “It is an urgent situation, but it’s not one, because it just took PennDOT eight weeks to get an emergency declaration,” Kurnath said. 

She added, “the pressure from the Department of the Interior [the parent agency to the NPS] is, ‘You’ve got a few weeks. Do the analyses, do all the reviews that really show that we’ve done our due diligence, understanding that it’s an emergency situation and respecting the governor’s declaration.’”

ACHP also raised concerns about the veracity of the emergency situation. 

Prior to PennDot getting an emergency declaration, an agreement was worked out in November, with PennDOT’s historic preservation partners to dismantle and preserve the bridge, ACHP wrote. “We find that the timing of the emergency declaration after the proposed path forward… may result in those consulting parties questioning the validity of the emergency declaration.”

It “undermines the intent” of historic preservation laws to use an emergency declaration to get around doing a proper historic review, ACHP suggested—though it did not accuse PennDOT of doing this in so many words. 

Takeaways

As plans to demolish the bridge move forward, local advocates for the bridge continue to rally around its legacy. 

A community event will be held at the Narrowsburg Union on January 12 from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., with guests to include descendants of the original builders and investors of the bridge, and performance and art inspired by the bridge. Call 272/999-6511 for more information or to RSVP. 

Jeff Dexter, the Damascus representative to the Upper Delaware Council, said the Sunday event would include several engineers discussing alternatives to the bridge’s destruction. 

“I don’t think there’s any hope we’re going to succeed… but this is the public’s chance to have their say,” Dexter said. 

A refrain throughout the process of public review has been the belief that PennDOT aims to tear down the Skinners Falls Bridge because it wants to build a modern bridge in its place. 

DCS reiterated that claim in its letter of January 3, saying, “PennDOT, with the approval of the Governor, is setting a destructive precedent for every historic and other bridge in the Commonwealth. That precedent is: wait, watch and document as the bridge falls apart, year after year, until PennDOT can declare an emergency to circumvent established Section 106, NEPA and other procedures to pursue the goal it wants, that goal being the destruction of the Skinners Falls Bridge.”

When asked, Roman denied that this has been PennDOT’s aim, claiming that PennDOT went through the review process for the Skinners Falls Bridge as quickly as the laws and the regulations allowed.   

“In no time did we say, ‘Let’s just drag our feet, let’s hide the ball, let’s do whatever euphemism you want to use, so that it collapses on its own so we don’t have to do anything.’ That has never been the case,” he said. 

He added, “I’m sure people will read this and say they don’t believe me, and I understand that, but I do know the process that needs to be followed.”