Big Change Coming to Unspoiled Province

Change is coming in a big way to this picturesque little island. One of the world’s longest bridges is rising, span by spectacular span, to connect Canada’s smallest province with the mainland.

The eight-mile bridge is more than half completed and is expected to open on schedule next June, replacing a ferry service that has linked the island to New Brunswick since 1832.

Sixty percent of island voters endorsed construction of a bridge in a 1988 referendum, and recent surveys suggest the approval rating has risen. But even among its proponents, the bridge rouses mixed emotions for those who fear the province’s “island way of life” may never be quite the same.

“Things will become faster-paced, and it will bring a lot more industry and business,” said Patricia Bradley, saleswoman at a Charlottetown gift shop that sells mugs bearing pictures of the bridge.

“There will be a lot more work here, maybe, but I really think there will be a lot more crime,” she added. “I don’t want it changed. It’s fine the way it is.”

By Canadian standards, Prince Edward Island is almost microscopic--roughly the size of Delaware with 135,000 residents. Charlottetown, the capital and biggest municipality, has 16,000 residents.

The scenery resembles the prettiest of New England--unspoiled seacoast, lobstermen fishing offshore, colorful farms on verdant rolling hills. Stringent regulations ban billboards on most highways and limit coastal development.

There is little crime and no slums. But the 14.5% jobless rate is the second-highest in Canada, mainly because the dominant industries--agriculture, tourism and fishing--are seasonal.

Government officials hope the bridge over the Northumberland Strait will boost the number of tourists to more than 1 million annually, up from the current 800,000, and inspire a wave of business investment as transport becomes cheaper and easier.

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Completion of the bridge “will usher in an era of undreamed-of opportunities,” Premier Catherine Callbeck said.

Tourism Minister Robert Morrissey says the projected tourist boom can be accommodated without building a lot of new hotels. He expects a proliferation of bed-and-breakfasts, and is looking for ways to stretch the island’s traditional two-month vacation season into June and September.

New England is a key market, he said, just an eight-hour or so drive once the ferries, and the threat of long waits, are gone.

“The size of the strait was viewed as something you couldn’t overcome,” Morrissey said. “But now the bridge dwarfs everything. The strait looks like a little puddle.”

The drive over the bridge will take about 15 minutes, compared with 45 minutes on the ferry. But islanders say that comparison understates the convenience the bridge will bring--in peak summer season, backed-up motorists often wait hours to get their vehicles aboard a ferry.

“It’s always a headache,” said Peter Toombs, president of DME Brewing Services, a Charlottetown company that exports equipment for microbreweries.

“Some customer is always asking how come there’s that extra half-day’s delay. With the bridge, we become part of the mainland, literally. It will be nice and simple.”

The bridge construction project is anything but simple, though it has proceeded on schedule and within its $613-million budget. Some 2,500 workers have been involved; three have been killed on the job.

The bridge consists of 44 spans, each with a main concrete girder 630 feet long. A towering, Dutch-built heavy-lifting vessel has been carrying the 7,500-ton girders from an on-shore construction site and hoisting them delicately atop huge piers rising from bases below the strait.

The water depth is roughly 100 feet, and the highest span is 197 feet, high enough for the world’s largest cruise ships to pass underneath.

At the expense of a spectacular view, the two-lane bridge will have solid side walls to help keep drivers from being unnerved by the height. The bridge is being curved to minimize the potentially hypnotic effect of a long straightaway.

But the paramount concern of the designers was the mass of ice that flows through the strait each winter. Fishermen and ecologists warned that the ice could damage the bridge or get jammed up by the piers.

The bridge builders--a consortium of French, Dutch and Canadian companies--solicited advice from some of the world’s top ice experts and designed huge cone-shaped shields to protect the piers. Those in place last winter proved effective--ice chunks rose up after hitting them, then crumbled and kept moving.

“There hasn’t been one surprise since the bridge started,” Morrissey said. “It’s been amazing. . . . People are so used to big projects screwing up.”

Islanders have been tossing around proposals for a bridge or tunnel for more than a century.

But in this era of deficit-fighting and budget cuts, the bridge never would have materialized had it not been for a promise made by the Canadian government in 1873, when it enticed Prince Edward Island to join the federation: The island was guaranteed, for eternity, continuous and “efficient” links to the mainland.

Until now, that promise has translated into ferry service. But government studies conducted in the 1980s concluded it would be cheaper, over the long term, to dole out severance pay to the 600 ferry workers and channel ferry subsidies into construction of a bridge.

So for the next 35 years, the federal government will be paying $30 million annually to the bridge consortium, Strait Crossing Inc., which in turn is taking full responsibility for financing and operating the bridge.

Tolls will be equivalent to what the ferry crossing costs--about $22 U.S. round-trip for a car. After 35 years, the bridge will transfer to federal ownership.