FALL RIVER Tony Elkhoury teared up when he was told that the new bridge on Brightman Street might not open for another three months.
“It’s crazy,” the owner of Tony’s Gas & Repair said. “I don’t know what to say. I’m very upset.”
The original 120-year-old, two-lane bridge that traverses Mass Coastal Railroad tracks has been closed to vehicular traffic since Sept. 28, 2020.
The Massachusetts Department of Transportation initially said the old timber bridge would be replaced by the end of last year.
But this week a MassDOT spokesperson said the soonest one can expect the new structure to open will be “within the next few months.”
Conant s Riverside Farms in Richmond In 2017, the Tipton family Benjamin, Michelle and two teenage children returned to Vermont after nearly a decade away to establish a family farm. They found and purchased a 20-acre former farmstead in Burke Hollow whose only remaining structure was a deteriorating barn. It had sunk a foot into the ground in places, many of its timbers had rotted, and the roof was near collapse. People in town knew it as the red barn on the hill that the foxes lived in, Benjamin Tipton said during a phone call from his other job as a physician s assistant.
OK, we weren t going
that fast. And, frankly, in a year when face-to-face time was hard to come by, the writer in me brimmed with optimism. I had been desperate for something new to say about this campaign, and here I was, rumbling across West Main Street and into a field of potential metaphors. There was only one problem: I couldn t hear the candidate or much of anything over the roar of the Bobcat. I extended my recorder and hoped for the best while our host, Alison Kosakowski Conant, steered us past patches of pumpkins and gourds and shared what I assumed was her assessment of farm life. But I knew that, when I listened to the tape hours later, I would be lucky to pick up every fifth word. It was a bust.