The pontoon bridge near Estherwood will be closed until August.

There has been construction on the bridge on and off since the 2016 floods, but now, it’s closed yet again, leaving some residents wondering when they’ll have a consistent route to work.

One nearby resident said he has to drive 20-30 minutes out of the way to get to work every morning.

The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development is the agency in charge of repairing the bridge. 

District engineer administrator, Bill Oliver, says the bridge wasn’t supposed to be closed for long at all. The original plan was for it to open back up next month, but other issues were discovered that extended the closure until August.

“We found that the bearings on top of the towers had failed and some of the pins in the pivot arm which hold the barge in place were also at the point of almost failure,” said Oliver.

He says he understands driver’s frustration with the lengthy closure, but adds that the repairs are crucial since they’re needed to keep drivers safe.

“We had to close the bridge to traffic immediately because any operation of the bridge could have caused a catastrophic failure… You could have had a failure of the steel cable that would have caused the counterweights to fall on a vehicle or something severe,” Oliver said.