The Alaska Department of Transportation has announced that a new $19 million bridge near Dillingham is now open to traffic.<\/p>\n
The Aleknagik Wood River Bridge was formally opened during a ceremony last week. Political figures and DOT director Marc Luiken cut the ribbon to open the bridge, a 440-foot span that connects the two sides of the village of Aleknagik.<\/p>\n
The opening was announced by email from the DOT.<\/p>\n
The village, which has a population of about 200, is up Wood River from Dillingham. The south side of the village is connected to Dillingham by a road, but the north side, which contains the village\u2019s runway and post office, was divided from the south by a lake and Wood River.<\/p>\n
Boats or (in winter) an ice road connected the village\u2019s two halves, but the crossing was at times treacherous. More than a dozen people had died since 1970 on the route.<\/p>\n
An earmark from Sen. Ted Stevens started project planning in the early 2000s, and the Alaska Legislature in 2008 allocated $20 million for construction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Alaska Department of Transportation has announced that a new $19 million bridge near Dillingham is now open to traffic. The Aleknagik Wood River Bridge was formally opened during a ceremony last week. Political figures and DOT director Marc Luiken cut the ribbon to open the bridge, a 440-foot span that connects the two sides […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-7897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7897"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=7897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}