Engineers say they think they can stop Whitby's swing bridge from becoming stuck by changing the colour of the road surface.
Engineers say they think the problem's over the summer with the bridge becoming stuck were due to heat expansion, and they say laying a different colour road service might be the solution.
County Council Bridge manager Phil Richardson says it will involve resurfacing work.
The Swing Bridge was built in 1909 mechanised in 1983. The county council says that failures of the bridge operation have been reduced from twenty plus per year to approximately four per year since 2012. They say it is likely that some of the recent closures have involved extremely high temperatures which prevented the bridge opening
The bridge became jammed several times over the summer months.
Phil Richardson says they think the bridge was expanding in the summer heat and that changing the colour of the road will cool it down.
In a report to councillors last week Phil explained the reasons behind one of the closures in July.
"In July the Bridge Manager attended a breakdown which was due to the failure of a limit switch on the East leaf of the bridge which indicated falsely that the leaf was closed and when the West leaf was closed it jammed at the centre of the bridge which left an open gap.
After consulting the contractor, Fairfield we unjammed the bridge and manually closed the East leaf and that allowed the West leaf to close then the engineer arrived on site and replaced the faulty limit switch and bridge was tested and put back into use. The bridge was operational and checked within an hour of the arrival of the engineer.
There was unfortunately disruption for the users for three hours while we unblocked the bridge leafs which had jammed. Fairfield’s are
currently looking into additional measures to ensure there is a secondary sensor or another way to ensure the bridge cannot be operated in this circumstance. There are numerous options and they are being evaluated before being implemented.Failures of this type cannot be predicted as the limit switches are checked during the services which are carried out twice a year. The electronic sensors that we have introduced on the bridge can be remotely checked and if they are not operating correctly they can be swapped easily for a new one. "
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