If you think for a moment about all the things Louisiana is known for, you’d be unlikely to find its bridges on most people’s list, yet in that infrastructure category the state is both a national and global standout.
While we may not be home to the most bridges in the nation — Texas handily takes that title with a whopping 56,729 bridges — maybe unsurprisingly, the “Pelican State” boasts the most bridges over water in the nation. And while Texas may beat us on quantity, when it comes to bridges, you could say everything’s bigger in Louisiana as the state claims four of the five longest bridges in the nation.
We like to build our bridges long and over water, and the ultimate example of this is the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, known more commonly as The Causeway. A feat of engineering, The Causeway holds both the titles of the longest bridge in the United States and the Guinness Book of World Record distinction of the world’s longest continuous bridge over water at 23.87 miles.
While these are fun pieces of trivia, and ones that draw visitors from around the globe, when you take a closer look at The Causeway — from its construction to its daily operation — you get a more complete picture of how truly unique a creation it is and how fortunate we are to have it continue to serve as a critical connection between the third- and fourth-largest parishes in the state.
THE MAKING OF A MARVEL
In 1956, New Orleans was thriving. In fact, that year’s population count of 627,525 remains the highest the city has ever seen. Starting in 1957, population levels in the city started declining, and among the likely reasons was the rise of the Northshore, made possible by the opening of The Causeway.
Before the bridge, access between Lake Pontchartrain’s north and south shores was limited to ferries and steamboats or a long drive around the lake. At that time, St. Tammany Parish was a rural area dominated by farming, timber and boat building with a population of only about 35,000.
To connect the two shores in a more efficient manner, Louisiana’s constitution was amended in 1952 to allow Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes to come together and finance and construct a toll bridge that would not rely on federal funds or state general obligation taxes. Charged with making this dream a reality, in 1954 the Greater New Orleans Expressway Commission (GNOEC), formed with the purpose of overseeing the construction, operation and maintenance of the bridge.
At the time, the longest bridge in the world spanned just 8.26 miles — Germany’s Wuppertal Schwebebahn steel suspended monorail, which ran mostly above water. The Causeway would be almost three times its length and built not above the water but in it.
The question was, how do you build a bridge unlike any in the world? The answer: You create a new way of building bridges, and to do that, you create your own company.
What the Ford Motor Company did for the automobile, the Louisiana Bridge Company did for bridges — they both changed their industries by harnessing the power of assembly-line mass-production for the first time.
Hollywood Famous
The bridge has a feature film named for it — “Causeway,” a 2022 movie starring Jennifer Lawrence that was distributed by Apple TV+. The movie stars Lawrence as a soldier who served in the war in Afghanistan struggling to return to life in New Orleans. Lawrence ends up befriending a man who lost a leg in a car crash on the Causeway. Surprisingly, none of the filming for the movie was done on the bridge. “That’s my fault,” said General Manager Carlton Dufrechou. “They wanted to shut down traffic, so I had to say no. A mission is a mission.”
BREAKING THE MOLD
If you’re close to exiting the northbound side of The Causeway and you look to the right, you’ll see some blue-roofed structures. That is where the Louisiana Bridge Company — a joint venture between Brown and Root, Inc. of Houston and T.L. James Company of Ruston, Louisiana — partnered with a company out of Omaha, Nebraska called the Raymond Concrete Pile Company to build a yard where the pieces for the bridge would be constructed.
Using Raymond Concrete’s innovative techniques in prestressed concrete, the 40-acre yard’s approximately 750 employees worked to craft very dense, 54-inch, hollow prestressed concrete cylinder piles by spinning concrete at a high speed inside a form. The result was building blocks that were more than twice as large and significantly stronger than standard piles at the time. Precast concrete was also used to create the pile caps and concrete decks for the bridge.
The Causeway was designed by engineering firm Palmer & Baker, a Mobile, Alabama-based company that had previously used prefabricated concrete to construct the totally submerged, half-mile-plus Bankhead Tunnel in Mobile Bay in 1941 in 22 months. Just like with the tunnel’s construction, fabricated pieces for The Causeway were barged out for assembly in the lake.
The first large-scale use of prestressed concrete, The Causeway wasn’t just built big, it was built fast. The contract for the first span of the bridge (now the Southbound bridge) specified 23 months for construction — it was completed in just 19 and opened on August 29, 1956.
NO RISK, NO REWARD
“The bridge was a really risky endeavor,” explained Carlton Dufrechou, who has served as the general manager of the Greater New Orleans Expressway Commission for 16 years. “This was an almost $50 million investment back in 1956 (about $184 million today). That’s a lot of money to do something that had never been done before.”
Fortunately, the investment quickly paid off. In its first year, The Causeway welcomed 50,000 transits; by the mid-to-late-1960s, it was up to about 2 million a year.
To handle the increased demand, a second bridge would be built just for Northbound traffic. At a cost of $30 million, it opened on May, 10, 1969.
Riders will notice that the original, now southbound bridge is a bumpier ride. That is due to the differences in construction. The deck sections on the original bridge are 56 feet long and 28 feet wide, while the northbound sections are 84 feet long.
“The engineers built the original decks with more of a camber (a predesigned curve) because they thought the decks would start to sag a little after a while, but they never did,” explained Dufrechou. “So when the second bridge was built, they make the sections longer with less camber which makes for a smoother ride.”
On Nov. 8, 2013, the bridge’s engineering achievement was recognized as an American Society of Civil Engineers National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark with a plaque at the Northshore toll plaza office building. It includes a quote from the Engineering News-Record praising the bridge as “a bold venture requiring unusual foresight, ingenuity and resourcefulness.”
LIFE ON THE WATER — IT CAN GET CHOPPY
The Causeway now facilitates about 12 million transits a year — with about 19,000 every weekday and about half that on weekend days. Unsurprisingly, a lot can happen when you put that many people above open water for 24 miles.
Nobody knows that better than Thea Andras. Andras has served with the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway Police for 30 years, the last two years as its chief. A native of Washington Parish, she started out her law enforcement career at the parish’s sheriff’s office.
“Back then, there were no females in law enforcement in Washington Parish,” she explained. “There had never been a woman on patrol, so I was fighting against that. Eventually, I got [the sheriff’s office] to send me to the academy, and at the time the gentlemen’s agreement was that you’d be expected to put in at least a year of service. I served exactly a year as a dispatcher there and then started looking for somewhere else. I didn’t want to be stuck in a room.”
One of Andras’ old sergeants helped her find a job on The Causeway, where she became the department’s first female sergeant, then lieutenant, then captain, then chief, where she now oversees about 30 officers.
Far from being “stuck in a room,” officers are trained to handle a wide array of situations on the bridge, aided by a separate team called the Motorist Assistance Patrol (MAP).
“When anything happens on the bridge, the dispatchers call us both and we back each other up,” explained Andras.
Dispatchers working from GNOEC headquarters on the Southshore monitor 37 cameras for any issues.
A Big Target
The Causeway has been hit 15 times by commercial water traffic, including once before it was opened. In three cases the bridge sustained damage. In two, vehicles went into the lake.
“Every day we have at least maybe 10 breakdowns,” said Dufrechou, who shared that other issues on the bridge have ranged from heart attacks and attempted suicides to escaped animals including chickens, horses, alligators and a burro. Rescuing drivers that have run out of gas is a very common occurrence, he noted, especially with rising gas prices. During a particularly eventful breakdown on May 6 of this year, the southbound lanes of The Causeway were closed for about an hour when a carjacking suspect fleeing police from Mandeville ran out of gas and jumped into the lake near mile marker 10.
Andras said her team is always prepared for the chance that a road issue goes aquatic.
“All of our vehicles have life jackets, Jacob’s ladders and life rings,” she said. “We also have our own trucks with rescue baskets, and everyone has water rescue training.”
The distance between the deck of the bridge and the water is typically about 16 feet, and the water under the bridge is about 12 to 14 feet deep, enough to be an issue if a vehicle goes over the railing, which was something Dufrechou said became more common starting in the mid-1990s.
“We started seeing over boards become much more common then, especially on the southbound bridge, because of the popularity of pickups and SUVs on the road,” he said. “The original bridge was built with just a 25-inch rail barrier, while the Northbound barriers are 31 inches.”
Around 2016, the bridge began looking at increasing the rail heights and also adding shoulders to help decrease rear-end collisions and increase overall safety.
“We looked at the cost of adding a shoulder to the whole bridge and it was about $2 billion, which would have pushed the toll price from the $2 at the time to $24,” he said. “Obviously, that wasn’t feasible, so we opted instead for a $1 increase that allowed us to bond out $100 million to add over 12,000 feet of shoulders – tripling the emergency stopping area on the bridge — and increase the southbound rails went up by two feet. The project started in 2018 and was completed in 2021.”
A big part of keeping the bridge safe, Dufrechou noted, is keeping speed down. The Causeway Police issues about 8,000 citations a year for speeding; however, the bridge doesn’t see any money from that work.
“If a car is radared in the first 12 miles of the bridge, then that money goes to Jefferson Parish,” explained Andras. “If it’s in the second half, it goes to St. Tammany Parish.”
Andras said the Causeway Police experiences the same recruitment and retention issues shared by most police forces around the country but added that one element specific to her force might present an extra challenge for some.
“You really have to be OK with yourself to work here,” she said. “You’re by yourself a lot out here — all our units are solo, and your backup may be 12 to 24 miles away, not like the typical two miles with other forces. You need to know what you’re doing and be OK with you. Plus, it’s not like you can go somewhere and grab something to eat like other officers can. Our job is to get people from one end of this bridge to the other as safely as possible, and if you’re somewhere else, you can’t do that.”
Power Possibilities
The first half of the bridge is powered by Entergy, while the second half is powered by Cleco. However, if either side experiences any issues, the bridge can switch to being fully powered by one utility.
SELF SUSTAINING
In addition to its own police force and Motor Assistance Patrol, The Causeway also boasts its own fueling station near the Northshore toll booths — double-walled tanks that hold about 2,000 gallons of gas and diesel.
“Our ability to buy gas in bulk definitely helps when it comes to servicing our fleet of about 100 vehicles,” noted Robert Graham, who has worked as director of operations for the bridge since 2017. A Madisonville resident for 62 years, Graham worked as a mechanic with the Ford Motor Company for 12 years before joining The Causeway in 1995, when it was just starting its own automotive division. In his first six years, he moved from mechanic to supervisor of The Causeway’s maintenance facility located behind Mandeville High School.
“We’ve grown from what was a one-room stall to now eight stalls and four lifts,” he said. “It’s big a big cost savings to be able to handle everything ourselves, from our police vehicles to our 20 maintenance trucks.”
As director of operations, Graham handles a wide array of duties every day — from tallying up toll deposits for pickup by Brinks Security to ensuring the bridge’s drawbridge at the 16-mile marker can lift and lower more than 30 times to facilitate traffic to Madisonville’s annual Wooden Boast Festival every October.
And Graham’s work doesn’t end where the bridge does. A little-known fact is that the building of the bridge encompassed the construction of roadways on both sides of the lake reaching to Jefferson Highway on the south end and Covington on the north. While Jefferson Parish took back the roads on the south shore long ago, The Causeway still maintains five miles of roads on the Northshore, the maintenance of which (including signage, landscaping and maintaining seven traffic lights) eats up about $1 million of its annual $7.5 to $8 million operations budget.
The Causeway’s total annual budget is about $30 million, which Dufrechou said is fairly equally split between maintenance, staff, debt service and operations, adding “about half of the last one goes to insurance.”
Dufrechou said the bridge’s original construction debts of $46 million and then $30 million have been refinanced seven times and that the total is set to be retired in 2033. The $100 million safety program that was finished in 2021 will be paid off in 2047.
About 80% of the budget’s funds comes from tolls. The rest comes from Highway Fund No. 2. The Causeway has been a toll bridge from day one, when booths on both sides of the bridge collected $1 each way. The toll booths on the south side of the bridge were removed to ease congestion in 1999.
The current toll is $6 for those without a toll tag and $3.40 with a tag. But even with this substantial savings, Dufrechou noted that only about 64% of regular commuters have a toll tag, a number he’s always looking for ways to increase. The bridge is also actively looking at the feasibility of all-electronic tolling.
LA Leads
Louisiana is home to four of the five longest bridges in the country.
23.87 miles: Lake Pontchartrain Causeway
22.8 miles: Manchac Swamp Bridge
18.29 miles: Louisiana Airborne Memorial Bridge (formerly Atchafalaya Basin Bridge)
17.6 miles: Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel (not in LA)
11 miles: Bonnet Carre Spillway Bridge
Katrina Marks remain
At the 9-mile marker heading south, travelers will see what looks like unfinished work on the bridge — an offshoot that goes nowhere. This is the remnant of what used to be a clover-shaped turnaround that wound under the bridge. It was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina.
BEYOND MEASURE
Whether speaking with Dufrechou or Andras or Graham, the message remains the same: The Causeway is so much more than a span of concrete over water.
“It’s got a soul,” said Dufrechou. “It will always be this primary connector but it’s also this living entity of its own and that’s because of the dedication of our staff, who are here 24 hours a day, and the motorists who are always reaching out to let us know if there’s an issue. The result is a bridge that I’d say is four to five times safer than any other interstate system on the Gulf Coast. Here, you know that no matter the weather, if something happens, someone will be there to help within minutes. It’s our job. It’s our passion. The people are the real wonder of this bridge.”
