Terminal Island Cargo Has Outgrown Old Bridge

The Gerald Desmond Bridge towers 250 feet over the back channel of Long Beach Harbor, providing a vital connecting route between downtown Long Beach and Terminal Island, linking cargo ships to terminals.

These days, the bridge also wears a diaper.

Unable to sustain the daily onslaught of trucks and cars, the 36-year-old bridge has started to buckle, sending pieces of concrete into the water. To catch the debris, port officials have placed a net, which some call a "diaper," under the bridge.

With a replacement bridge plan underway, port officials say 10% of all the nation's waterborne cargo now travels across the Desmond bridge on its way to or from the docks. But the structure has not kept up with the times.

When it was built, planners expected only modest traffic -- mostly people going to and from the Long Beach Naval Shipyard on Terminal Island. But when the shipyard was closed in the mid-1990s, the land became home to six container terminals, which spread over 1,600 acres and handled an estimated $15 billion in imports in 2003. Port officials estimate truck traffic across the bridge has tripled and cargo ships traveling under the bridge have more than doubled in size.

"Its capacity is inadequate; the height is inadequate, because we don't have the ability to get large ships underneath the bridge and into the back harbor; and thirdly, the physical condition of the bridge is marginal," said John Hancock, president of the Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners.

Bridging the gap between Long Beach and Terminal Island has long challenged planners.

Before any structure connected the two lands, a ferry carried passengers across the back channel, port officials said.

Eventually, a pontoon bridge was erected by the Navy during World War II as a temporary structure to reach the shipyard. The pontoon, which floated on water, was a concrete roadway with a wood and metal bottom. It had to be opened in the middle every time a ship needed to pass, forcing cars to wait.

It was so peculiar that it became a Southland attraction and was featured in a road scene in the 1963 film "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World."

In a 1966 Times article, a pontoon bridge operator was quoted as estimating that the structure opened and closed at least 100 times a day. He recalled frequently throwing life preservers to drivers whose vehicles became airborne and landed in the water after the drivers failed to navigate the unusually shaped bridge surface, which dipped suddenly during the crossing. Many drivers did not survive the dip and drowned in the channel, which is 170 feet wide and 50 feet deep.