Ten years ago a team of engineers and surveyors came to Fauquier. The BC government announced with great fanfare the building of the bridge promised nearly 50 years ago to replace the present ferry system. Then the price of steel went up and the estimated cost of the construction nearly doubled and the project was scrapped. Today we are still using the ferry to get across the Arrow Lake.

Looking North: Logging Truck Leaving Needles Ferry at Fauquier

Quite a bit of costly planning had already gone into the bridge project. The following are pictures and a video I dug up from the files in my archive and I present them here as a little nostalgic piece about a bridge that never was.

If one takes a close look at the second panel with the cost projections, one can easily see that a large amount of tax payers money was wasted, before the project was scrapped. Below is the video of the bridge as envisioned by design engineers, which is beautiful, but no doubt was also very expensive to make.

In 2006 as manager of the Fauquier Internet Society I helped build the wireless system to provide broadband service to the people of our small rural community. The name of the website is ‘arrowbridge.ca’, and quite intentionally so to serve as a perpetual reminder of the ‘bridge that never was’.