BANGOR, Maine — If Bangor is the gateway to the Great North Woods, the Penjajawoc Preserve makes sure that gate is always open.
The 6500 acres of marshland and forests within Bangor city limits seem untouched and unchanged—but soon a piece of cutting-edge technology will enter this landscape, joining two banks of the Penjajawoc Brook that have been unconnected since the wooden bridge spanning its width rotted away.
"It's going to outlast us all," Lucy Quimby, president of the Bangor Land Trust, said on Wednesday of the plan to install a new bridge in the Northeast Penjajawoc Preserve, using $15,000 dollars in COVID relief funds given to the trust.
The bridge is notable for the material it uses: composite beams made of fiberglass mixed with polyurethane resin. It’s a concoction the project’s design engineer Anthony Diba compares to combining newsprint and glue to make papier-mache.
“This material does not rust like steel, it does not rot like wood… it has a lot of advantages,” Diba said near the Grist Mill Bridge in Hampden, where his employer AIT used the same composite method to build a bridge across the Soudabscook Stream Reservoir in Hampden.
Beyond offering a more durable alternative to wood, Diba says he believes the upsides go beyond that, adding, “Pound per pound, they are way easier to get into the woods instead of a big concrete or steel beam.”
Volunteers with Bangor Land Trust have already begun making the near-mile trek from the trailhead to the site of the brook carrying the materials to build the bridge—which will be assembled with help from AIT.
Once complete, Diba says the composite on the bridge will last a century.