ALBANY COUNTY — A temporary bridge for the Helderberg-Hudson Rail Trail over Route 85 in Slingerlands is expected to be in place by the end of September, according to George Penn, Albany County’s director of operations.

The bridge had buckled on July 12, just weeks after being put in place.

Penn updated the county legislature’s Public Works Committee on Tuesday night, and his comments were related to The Enterprise by Guilderland legislator Mark Grimm.

“An engineer report on what went wrong is expected to be finished by the end of next week,” said Grimm. “That should shed some light on the collapse.”

The county executive’s office had been tight-lipped on the cause of the collapse. The office did issue a release on July 20 that said the bridge would be shored up by the end of this week and removal of the steel is anticipated to occur next week.

“Once the steel is removed, drainage work, paving and sidewalk work will be completed on State Route 85,” the release said; when that work is complete, expected at the end of August, eastbound traffic on Route 85 will reopen from 6 to 10 a.m.

To open the trail and both lanes of Route 85, plans are being worked on to install a temporary pedestrian bridge, the release said, which is expected to be functioning before the original Oct. 31 completion date.

“At that time, both lanes of State Route 85 will open,” the release said. “The investigation into the cause of last week’s incident continues.”

The original century-old bridge — signs showed its height to be 11 feet, 2 inches — had been repeatedly struck by trucks traveling on Route 85.

Albany County acquired the bridge in 2009, as part of its purchase of the nine-mile stretch of railway that runs between the Port of Albany and Voorheesville that became the Helderberg-Hudson Rail Trail.

Built in 1912, the bridge had been in rough shape for some time. In 2019, the county said the bridge had been struck by vehicles passing beneath it nine times in the past 11 years. And it was struck several more times since.

A 2008 report said that the bridge’s structural steel and much of its concrete were in “very poor condition.”

A 2017 inspection by the New York State Department of Transportation said that the structure was in such bad shape, its deficiencies could “significantly impact” the bridge’s “load carrying capacity.” In 2018, the county made temporary repairs to the bridge.

And in 2019, the county decided on a $1.9 million plan to remove the 42-foot wide existing bridge and replace it with a two-girder structure that is 14-feet wide, raising the structure to 15 feet, 6 inches above the roadway to meet state requirements.

Construction on the new bridge was to start in the summer of 2020 but was delayed by both the pandemic and litigation.

The Enterprise reported last August that the cost had about doubled from the original $1.9 million because of legal challenges and having to relocate buried cable.