The city of Quincy moved its battle against a new Long Island Bridge into court last week, asking a judge to overturn the state’s approval of Boston’s plan to replace the span that was demolished in 2014 due to safety concerns. A new bridge would let Boston rebuild the addiction-treatment facilities that it previously operated on the island.

Although Long Island is part of Boston, the bridge to it connected with the mainland in Quincy. Boston tore down the roadway leading to it in 2015.
Despite repeated attempts by Quincy to persuade state regulators to block the rebuilding plan, Boston has continued its push to put up a new bridge and re-open Long Island as a public-health campus.

In its suit filed in Suffolk Superior Court on Feb. 6, Quincy argues that the state Department of Environmental Protection had approved a shoddy, cheap inspection and construction method that could mean the new bridge could collapse– there’s just no way to tell, Quincy alleges – and that Boston should be dealt with severely for, among other things, not properly recording its original 1950 construction with the Suffolk County Registry of Deeds and not recording a 2015 state approval to re-do utility connections to the island with the Norfolk County Registry of Deeds.

In its complaint, Quincy charges that Boston’s plan to re-use supports built for the original bridge in 1950 is flawed, in part because it performed “only limited testing on some (not all) of the concrete piers,” which it alleges means there’s no accurate measurement of potential damage from “decades-long alkali-silica reaction and freeze-thaw conditions resulting from saltwater inundation and exposure in the marine environment for over 70 years.”

And then, Quincy adds, Boston wrangled state approval of a plan to make any repairs via “limpets” – box-like structures that do not go below the mud line – where there might be even more lurking problems, rather than installing “coffer dams” around each support so that the piers can be fully exposed for detailed examinations that would show whether more extensive work might be needed.

Additionally, Quincy argues that rising sea levels means the state should have considered new data on whether the bridge would remain safe for ships passing under it, but it did not.

For all these issues and more – the state wouldn’t let Quincy use engineers licensed somewhere other than Massachusetts to provide expert testimony, for example –Quincy is asking a judge to rescind the approval and tell the state to do its job correctly this time.

And rising sea levels means the state should have considered new data on whether the bridge would remain safe for ships passing under it, but did not, Quincy charges.