Swain’s Cut Bridge carries NC 906 across the Atlantic

Intracoastal Waterway The Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) is a inland waterway along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts of the United States, running from Massachusetts southward along the Atlantic Seaboard and around the southern tip of Florida, then following th ...

(ICW) connecting Oak Island, NC to the mainland. Built for $36 million under contract to the

North Carolina Department of Transportation The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) is responsible for building, repairing, and operating highways, bridges, and other modes of transportation, including ferries in the U.S. state of North Carolina. History The North Carolina ...

, the bridge opened for traffic in the fall of 2010. A high rise design similar to the Barbee Bridge which crosses the ICW at the east end of the island, the Swain's Cut Bridge is built over a narrow part of the channel and required only three main spans while the Barbee Bridge needed 37.

History

Upon completion of the ICW in the late 1930s, a

swingbridge A swing bridge (or swing span bridge) is a movable bridge that has as its primary structural support a vertical locating pin and support ring, usually at or near to its center of gravity, about which the swing span (turning span) can then pi ...

initially provided access from the mainland to Oak Island. Destroyed by a barge strike in 1971, the Barbee Bridge opened in 1975 as its replacement. As Oak Island’s population grew however, the large volume of summer vacation traffic and hurricane evacuation concerns prompted the state to approve building a second bridge on the west end of the island over Swain’s Cut. The bridge is named for the Swain family, which owned the land around the bridge during the dredging of the ICW in the 1930s. At the same time the bridge was being built, a three mile long extension of NC 906 was constructed to connect it to NC 211.

Design and Construction

The , deck structure, consists of prestressed concrete girders which carry four traffic lanes across the ICW at 65’ above

Mean High Water A chart datum is the water level surface serving as origin of depths displayed on a nautical chart. A chart datum is generally derived from some tidal phase, in which case it is also known as a tidal datum. Common chart datums are ''lowest ast ...

. The bridge has for the most part been accident free with the notable exception of a construction related incident in December 2008 when a concrete girder placed on a pier dislodged before it was property secured, fell to the ground and killed one worker. The

National Bridge Inventory The National Bridge Inventory (NBI) is a database, compiled by the Federal Highway Administration, with information on all bridges and tunnels in the United States that have roads passing above or below them. That is similar to the grade-crossing ...

for 2017 listed the bridge condition as good.

References

External links

* {{Commons category-inline Road bridges in North Carolina Buildings and structures in Brunswick County, North Carolina Concrete bridges in the United States