Yahoo! News - Ships Clog River After Bridge BreaksOddly Enough - Reuters
Ships Clog River After Bridge Breaks
Wed Oct 9, 7:33 AM ET
St. PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Ships and barges queued up St. Petersburg's Neva river Tuesday after one of the city's most famous drawbridges refused to open, closing off access to the Baltic Sea.
The rising bridges which symbolize Russia's "Venice of the North" are one of the most popular attractions during the city's "White Nights," when the northern summer cloaks the city in a permanent twilight. The bridges, kept down during the day, are lifted during the night to allow boat traffic to pass through.
"At night, during the second lifting, one of the cogs of the lifting mechanism broke and we could not open the bridge," an Emergency Ministry official said.
The Palace Bridge, one of the most famous of the city's 800 bridges, was expected to be fixed by Wednesday. Built in 1916 and ignored by repairmen since the 1970s, the bridge links the Winter Palace of Russia's Czars to Vasilyev Island, home to the city's university and naval museum.
Twenty-one ships were blocked on the Neva by Tuesday evening. But St. Petersburg residents annoyed at being unable to return to Vasilyev Island late at night were sure to celebrate.
A sunken barge caused shipping chaos in the Neva in August, clogging traffic to the Gulf of Finland for a week.
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