Connecticut officials on Monday praised first responders and construction crews who worked through the weekend to get a stretch of Interstate 95 in Norwalk reopened to traffic following a Thursday tractor-trailer fire.
Hundreds of construction personnel worked over the weekend to demolish the Fairfield Avenue Bridge, which was structurally damaged in the fire, and get the highway surface ready for vehicle travel.
Gathered Monday morning at the site of the crash, officials celebrated a return to normalcy for traffic on the busy section of highway, which fully reopened to both northbound and southbound travel on Sunday.
“Normally, the sound behind us gets a lot of complaints – highway noise,” said Connecticut Department of Transportation Commissioner Garrett Eucalitto. “I think today is probably the only day we’re not going to get complaints about highway noise, so I’m going to relish that.”
Eucalitto praised DOT personnel as well as other state agency workers, federal agencies, and his transportation counterparts in other states, “from Maryland all the way up to Massachusetts,” he said.
“Too often in government you have politicians who overpromise and underdeliver,” said Gov. Ned Lamont, flanked by workers and state and local leaders. “Not the people standing behind me here. These guys over-delivered.”
“This was an amazing work of art,” Lamont said.
Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal praised workers for a “symphony of teamwork.”
“Guys behind me here have been without sleep for quite a while, and as good as they look, those guys in the yellow vests have given time, effort, energy,” Blumenthal said.
Connecticut Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, a Norwalk Democrat, said “there was gridlock, really, throughout the city” from the time of the crash through the full highway reopening on Sunday.
At the state Capitol in Hartford on Monday afternoon, DOT workers were introduced and applauded in front of both chambers of the General Assembly.
“What an extraordinary thing to do,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, a New Haven Democrat. “It points out the work that our state employees do in crisis situations and how much that can mean to us. Everybody in the General Assembly certainly celebrates what you did.”
DOT spokesperson Josh Morgan said the affected section of I-95 carries more than 120,000 vehicles per day, and it was vital to both Connecticut and the region to get it back open.
“We saw on traffic cameras, when just that small section of 95 was shut down, the logjam that it created on other highways,” Morgan said. “As well as the local roads in Norwalk. So it was so important for us to get that roadway opened as quickly as we could.”
Still, replacing the highway overpass bridge will take time and money. Eucalitto said the demolition and reconstruction would likely cost around $20 million, with a ribbon-cutting hopefully coming within a year. Blumenthal said the federal government would bear the brunt of that cost.
