A Sustainable Modular Bridge Solution

When we talk about road stream crossings, there are several issues at play that make massive problems both for local communities and for the watersheds and ecosystems that depend on these on these road stream crossings for passage. What's cheap to build is a round culvert as small as you can get it. Two small culverts are cheaper than one big culvert. Three small culverts are way cheaper than one bigger culvert. And so people just kinda threw in what they had. We've really created a bunch of messes. As climactic events have increased in their frequency, and their severity over the last twenty or thirty years, we're seeing massively supercharged hydraulic events, big rainfalls that a lot of the road stream crossings that were put in thirty and forty and in some cases decades ago simply were not designed to handle. What we are restoring here is connections from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to streams who have their headwaters on the Appalachians. I mean, that's where Atlantic salmon historically went. And to get them back there, we gotta get them up the big rivers. When we get up here, it's all about the bridges and the culverts. In Maine, we have this unique opportunity to conserve and reconnect main stems of rivers in an unbroken way to direct headwater forests that have never been converted from being forests. These critical upstream headwater regions that have always been forested supply the highly oxygenated water and the super cold water that species like sea run Atlantic salmon and eastern brook trout need to reproduce. These road stream crossings limit both the fish getting to those places and the cold water that the fish need to survive from getting to the main stems of the rivers. When you are able to fix a road stream crossing such that it behaves and acts as though the road wasn't there at all, it really allows full ecosystem functionality. And that's the beauty of open bottom bridge structures. We can go in and we can remove a a culvert and do two things. We can make the road infrastructure more durable for people and the surrounding communities, make it way more flood resilient, and we can also create a situation where we can have that road fly over the stream as though it had no impact on the stream. And that also brings the ecological functionality back to that watershed. About three years ago, we recognized, ourselves and Wentworth partners. We had actually put together a a patent for a bridge abutment design. So with some research, we stumbled into this company called Aster Brands, and we said, hey, these these guys look like they have a really good program. Out of the blue, two and a half years ago, I called Jamie Johnson and, said, hey, this is what we're doing up here in in Maine. Within a couple of months, the Michigan folks had flown out and we started to develop a good rapport and started to collaborate. That collaboration became really a joint venture in in the bridge world. I got a phone call out of the blue, cold call, and I picked it up and it was it was a guy introduced himself as a guy from Maine. And he went on and we started talking a little bit and he told me he's he's doing some fairly interesting things in the bridge space. And wondered if we'd be interested in taking a look at what they were doing and seeing if there was any opportunity to work together. Got on a plane, we we flew to Maine, drove into the middle of almost nowhere and got a chance to see what they were doing and it truly was remarkable. Really innovative things that they're doing that they're focusing on small bridge crossings. They were using precast elements. They were looking at kind of changing the way bridges are built. We saw a lot of really high value in what they were doing focusing on the space that's largely been overlooked. And we started with pretty simple blocks. What we were doing sit we're we were creating a system that really made bridge engineering, especially in open spaces, very, very simple. You could just buy bridge kits and move on. As we progressed, made mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and then we said, hey, this is this is really this is bigger than us. As an engineer, I worked with Redi-Rock for probably twelve, fifteen years. We reached out to Jamie. Here we are two and a half, three years later and, now we're building bridges. So it's been a pretty amazing experience. We've got tremendous support from Virgo Bridge Company. We also have partners, Wentworth Partners and Associates, and they've been doing engineering on bridges for a lot of years too. So again, when it comes to the the technical design and questions that come up, we've got experts who have certainly done this, probably seen exactly what you're running into. It's not their first rodeo. So, so they've got a lot of technical know how. And then from the Astrobrands perspective, we've spent a long time really honing the ability to create technical tools, resources, whether it's construction details or design software. And so really between the three of us, we feel like there's gonna be tremendous support for anyone who wants to get involved in the the bridge crossing space, whether you're a contractor, whether you're an engineer, whether you're an owner. This is this is really gonna change how America builds bridges. I have no doubt.