Plans to weld Carrow Bridge shut have attracted further opposition.
- Credit: copyright: Archant 2014
Welding a Norwich river bridge shut would be totally unacceptable and impinge on a legal duty to allow boats access to the city, County Hall has been warned.
A row over the future of Carrow Bridge has intensified, with the Broads Authority ready to refuse Norfolk County Council permission to fix the bridge in place to reduce maintenance bills.
Carrow Bridge.
- Credit: Archant
And civic watchdog The Norwich Society has also raised concerns the temporary measure could become permanent.
The county council has spent £150,000 over the past five years to repair the bridge.
“Built into an office behind the rates counter, the machine consists of a series of tin cupboards, a battery of teleprinters, and a formidable control panel desk that seems to have come from a space-rocket launching site.
“The cupboards which are the crux of the whole machine, contain the ‘memories’ – two of them ‘working memory’ which more or less controls the machine’s system of operation and a ‘bulk memory’ consisting of two mechanisms where the permanent data is stored on reels of ordinary cinema-type film.”
In other words it was a touch complicated.
We said the cost of £37,000 was, on the face of it, high but it would have paid for itself within five years in savings although no staff in the city treasurer’s office would be put out of work.