New bridge helps restore beauty to Fayetteville park damaged by Hurricane Matthew

Green Street in downtown Fayetteville became a raging river the night Hurricane Matthew roared through.

The water from Hurricane Matthew that damaged the footbridge that connects Cross Creek Park to Lafayette Plaza came after a 500-year flooding event days earlier.

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“Basically, it undermined the existing bridge, and it took all of the pavers on the existing bridge, and it took all of the railings off the bridge,” Anthony Ramsey, with Fayetteville Parks and Recreation, said.

For the past several weeks, crews spent time constructing concrete footers that will hold the new bridge to replace the one destroyed by the storm.

The bridge was constructed off-site and was delivered and installed in one piece on Friday.

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“Once we got all of the nuts and bolts and all the geo-technical information, the engineer had to do the design, had all of the information he needed to get the abutment designed, then everything went into place,” Ramsey said.

The bridge will still need to be covered with concrete, but the bridge could be officially open to the public by Labor Day.

“We’re going to have a beautiful park where you can take pictures for weddings and all those type of things,” Ramsey said.