Blenheim’s Bridge: Thanks to NOVA, a Story of Upstate NY Resilience for All the World to See

The NOVA documentary Operation Bridge Rescue tells the heroic story of rebuilding the historic and iconic Blenheim Covered Bridge, washed away by floodwaters in 2011. It’s a story of passion and resilience in Upstate New York’s Schoharie County. .

Schoharie County is nothing if not resilient and thanks to Operation Bridge Rescue, a documentary filmed by PBS’s NOVA in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, the rest of the world knows it too. 

Bridgewright Stan Graton of Stan Garton II 3G, here at a celebration of the rebuilt Blenheim Bridge’s completion, called it a “phoenix”.

Filmed over several months in 2017 and 2018, Operation Bridge Rescue tells the story of a race against time to lift and twist and coax the rebuilt Blenheim Bridge–the world’s longest single-span covered bridge until it all was washed away by Irene in 2011–into place.

The backdrop of the film?

The Schoharie Creek, rising as crews ran out the clock.

NOVA filmmaker Joby Lubman said it best in a preview for the film:

The documentary follows the “efforts of bridgewrights and engineers to rebuild and move the new Blenheim Bridge into place, exploring themes of heritage, engineering history, and how covered bridges relate to community identity.”

For decades the 160-year-old Blenheim Bridge, on the National Historic Register as one of the last surviving twin-lane covered bridges, was the community’s identity, the perfect place for art shows, wedding shoots, casual photos, class reunions or a summertime leap into the swimming holes below.

Blenheim resident Gail Shaffer pins a corsage on Town Historian Fanchon Cornell at a 2018 celebration featured in the NOVA documentary.

Then, in a flash, it was gone, washed downstream, down the creek, over the Schoharie County line–making its resurrection a once-in-a-lifetime event worth documenting. 

And celebrating.

At first, no one quite believed the bridge was gone, and the loss hit like the death of a loved one. In the days and months that followed, volunteers, town officials, and members of Blenheim Flood Recovery Committee combed the creek’s banks, recovering pieces, scraps, not completely sure why. 

Maybe because they knew their iconic 19th century bridge would be back.

Rebuilding the Blenheim Covered Bridge, a National Historic Landmark, took nearly a year.

With some of what they’d recovered.

“We've found one rafter that was amazingly intact,” mutton-chopped Stan Graton of Stan Garton II 3G, the Vermont firm hired to replace the bridge, explains in the documentary, which first aired in October 2018.

“So, this'll be the piece that we can put into the bridge, where it was in 1855. It'll be part of their closure, I think. It's like a phoenix, you know? It's destroyed, and then it's rebirthed now.”

A phoenix indeed.

Blenheim, a close-knit town 40 miles southwest of the Albany, population fewer than 400, had already held its own celebration, a first chance for those who’d loved the bridge most to walk across it, sniffing in the smell of fresh-cut lumber, wiping away tears, and sharing memories–footage captured in Operation Bridge Rescue. 

Schoharie County fought FEMA long and hard for funding to rebuild the 1855 bridge–$6.7 million in the end–arguing it was a cornerstone to Blenheim’s flood recovery. 

“FEMA told us ‘Never in a million years,’” County Flood Recovery Coordinator Bill Cherry remembered. But they succeed through the sheer strength of will. Think that resilience again.

Schoharie County-strong. 

Schoharie Creek-strong.

 “Never give up and never accept defeat.” That’s how Supervisor Don Airey remembered that epic battle, calling the bridge sitting quietly behind him a monument to the region’s future made possible by people who preserved and made an impossible dream a reality.

It took nine months to build the new 266-foot long Blenheim Bridge and roll it into place as crews from Economy Paving first created a temporary roadway across the creek before using a large mechanical dolly to maneuver it around tight corners and then hydraulic jacks to raise it 25 feet before settling it down on the new abutments. 

Except a lot more complicated.

Today, it stands back in place as a testament to Blenheim’s never-say-die spirit, phoenix-like, high above the creek that claimed it once but never again, a monument to the past, but also the future.

Get a taste of the adventure at facebook.com/share/v/17miHskGKp/

Watch it in full with a Passport Subscription to WMHT. (There’s no better time to support Public Broadcasting) at pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/operation-bridge-rescue/