SHINE — State Department of Transportation crews reopened the Hood Canal Bridge at 4:45 p.m. Wednesday after it had been closed to traffic from both directions for six hours.
The draw span became misaligned with the bridge by about 7 feet and was stuck open at 10:28 a.m.
The closure backed up traffic to and from the North Olympic Peninsula on state Highway 104.
“We had a construction project out there that was replacing some of the anchor cables that hold the bridge in place to the sea floor,” said Transportation spokeswoman Claudia Bingham Baker shortly after the closure.
When bridge personnel opened the draw span to permit a submarine from Naval Base Kitsap Bangor to pass, they discovered the span had become misaligned and could not be closed, she said.
Baker said that tugs started to realign the draw span at 4:30 p.m.
Earlier plans to close the span at 2:30 p.m. didn’t work out because the slack tide needed for the tug work did not occur until later, Baker said.
The uncertainty about the tides, she said, was due to tide tables.
“It depends which tide table you look at,” she said.
For the bridge area Wednesday, the slack tide, when tugs would have the least resistance from the tides, could have been anytime between 2:30 p.m. and 4:15 p.m., she said.
Officials remained concerned that even if the bridge were successfully closed, it might be difficult to reopen, Baker said.
“We have a legal obligation to open the bridge to marine traffic, so whatever decision we make will be made in conjunction with the Coast Guard,” she said.
For the next few days, Transportation officials are asking mariners to request drawspan openings only during slack tides, Baker said in a news release.
The bridge, which is 7,869 feet long and opened in 1961, connects the Olympic and Kitsap peninsulas.
The west half was reconstructed in the early 1980s and the east half was replaced in 2009.
