A four-year rehabilitation of the Brooklyn Bridge could begin in as early as December, city transportation officials said earlier this week.

The landmark 126-year-old bridge is in dire need of repair, according to the city’s Department of Transportation. Its concrete roadway is cracked and worn. Its approaches and off-ramps are far too narrow to accommodate the 145,000 vehicles using the bridge each day, and much of the metalwork on the bridge—the anchorages, joints and railings—needs to be replaced and painted.

“If we don’t do something about it soon, it’s going to have some huge problems,” Rajendra Navalurkar, an engineer working on the project, told Community Board 1’s Seaport Committee during a Sept. 8 meeting. “It’s really a wide variety of work that needs to be done.”

When the work begins, on Dec. 1, Navalurkar said, the DOT will shut down the Manhattan-bound lanes of the bridge at night (from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.) and on some weekends (from 12 a.m. to 7 a.m. on Saturdays and 9 a.m. on Sundays), diverting traffic over the Manhattan Bridge or through the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel. Traffic heading east over the bridge into Brooklyn will not be interrupted, and the pedestrian walkway will remain open during construction.

The first phase of the project will see many of the approaches and off-ramps on both sides of the bridge widened to two lanes. Both concrete roadways will be sliced up and removed, then replaced with prefabricated slabs of concrete that will be lowered into place and joined together. Joannene Kidder, a staff manager in the DOT’s bridge division, said using pre-made slabs of roadway would mean less noise for nearby residents.

“All of this helps to eliminate the [more common] excavation and jack hammering,” Kidder said, “but there’s no such thing as silent construction.”

Another daunting task included in the project, awarded to Stanska Koch earlier this year, will be repainting bridge’s iconic arches and steel suspension cables, which haven’t seen a drop of fresh paint in more than two decades. Navalurkar said crews would clean the old, lead-based paint off of the bridge in enclosed negative-pressure cocoons to keep it from entering the air. 

Planning for the bridge’s rehabilitation began in 2007, when a State Department of Transportation report revealed the bridge was structurally deficient by federal standards. Large cracks and missing mortar were found in one of the massive stone blocks that anchor the bridge to the bottom of the East River. Several steel support beams that hold up the bridge’s approach ramps were corroded. The state released its report one month after the August 2007 collapse of the 1-35W bridge outside Minneapolis, in which 13 people died. 

Navalurkar said one of the trickiest parts of the project’s design was mapping out the complex series of detours needed to keep traffic flowing in both Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. When the Manhattan-bound lanes on the Brooklyn Bridge are closed, inbound traffic from the Manhattan Bridge will be diverted up Chrystie Street and down the Bowery, away from an already-congested Canal Street.

“The heart of this project is [getting] this work done and minimizing the impact for everybody concerned,” Navalurkar said. “Really, the key is maintenance and protection of traffic.”

For the most part, members of the Seaport Committee seemed satisfied with the DOT’s plan for mitigating traffic woes during the construction.

“I thought they covered all their bases,” committee chairman John Fratta said. “They covered a lot of the concerns that we had. We know its going to be a long project and there are going to be hardships, but its something that needs to get done.”

Committee members asked for toll-free passage on the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel during lane closures on the bridge, a move they said might prevent detoured traffic from tying up the toll-free Manhattan Bridge.

“The possibility of making the [tunnel] available for free during that time, and only during that time, would seem to make sense,” committee member Paul Hovitz said. “It would take a lot of the brunt off of the streets that the traffic exits onto.”

“It’s certainly something that’s getting serious consideration,” Kidder answered. “It’s by no means a dead issue.”