Reward offered over €1m damage to N7 bridge

South Dublin County Council has offered a reward of €10,000 to anyone who can identify the vehicle that caused more than €1 million of damage to Rathcoole Bridge on the N7 Dublin to Limerick Road.

The council, which took out advertisements yesterday in national newspapers warning of the emergency closure of the bridge, said major traffic disruption will be experienced at the busy Rathcoole junction until at least early January.

The damage to the bridge, which happened between September 12th and October 11th last, was discovered during a recent routine inspection.

According to the council, the damage caused by the "strike" reveals much about the type of vehicle that caused the damage. "It was not an ordinary caravan, this was some kind of rig with a tower like object or a small crane which may not have been folded down sufficiently," Mr Eamon Cunningham, the council's senior executive officer in the roads department, told The Irish Times.

"There are six steel spans supporting the concrete deck of the bridge. The rig, or whatever it was, struck the first with considerable force and bent it. But it missed the second, and hit the third, missed the fourth and hit the fifth and missed the sixth. The damage was focused on the south-bound carriageway," he said.

From this the council has determined that the vehicle must have been travelling at speed and, after the initial impact, recoiled on its own suspension before rising to hit the third steel beam, and so on. The council does not believe it would be possible for the driver not to notice or for the rig to have escaped damage to itself.

After the damage was discovered, the council immediately imposed a 7.5-tonne weight restriction on the bridge, which handles a large number of sand and gravel lorries weighing up to 50 tonnes.

However, further investigation forced the emergency closure with effect from Monday.

"We believe that somebody must have seen what happened, this is a very busy road at all hours of the day and night and we have taken the unusual step of offering a reward of €10,000 for information," Mr Cunningham said.

"Somebody knows about this. Somebody has repaired the damage or knows the rig and we want them to talk to us."

The N7 is the State's second busiest road with more than 70,000 vehicles crossing the Rathcoole bridge daily. An emergency traffic management plan has been put in place to deal with the expected increase in traffic over the Christmas period diverting southbound traffic onto the northbound carriageway and northbound traffic along the slip road off the motorway, through the Newcastle junction and back onto the motorway via the slip road north of the Newcastle junction. As a result, heavy delays are likely at the the next junction northwards, the Citywest interchange, as traffic travelling northbound and heading for south Dublin will build up at this point.