Drive out Drakes Island Road toward the water and there's a stretch where the pavement narrows, the marsh grass closes in on both sides, and you cross a bridge that flexes just slightly under your tires. That flex isn't your imagination. The Drakes Island Bridge was built in 1938, which makes it 88 years old this year, and it's the only road on or off the island.
People in Wells have been told for a while now that a new bridge is coming. What keeps changing is when. A 2024 recap from the engineering firm working on the project predicted construction would start in the winter of 2025 or early 2026. That window has already passed, and as of the most recent public update this past June, the project was still working through preliminary design. The delay isn't a town dragging its feet. It's that this particular 14-foot span sits inside a federally protected marsh, and building a bridge there means designing for water levels that haven't happened yet.
A Bridge Built for a Different Wells
The current structure is a single 14-foot span with a timber deck resting on timber substructure elements, tucked into the northern marsh area of Wells Harbor. Nearly nine decades in salt water and tidal flow have done what you'd expect. The town's own project documentation describes timber rot, section loss, and marine bore holes in the wood, along with guardrail sections that have failed outright.
None of that would be a five-alarm problem if there were another way in or out. There isn't. Everyone who lives on Drakes Island, and everyone headed to Drakes Island Beach, a quieter stretch of sand than Wells Beach or Moody Beach a few miles up the coast, crosses this same structure. There's no detour road, no second bridge, no alternate approach through the marsh.
The Meetings That Kept Moving the Date
The project has been public for a few years now, and each meeting has added detail without locking in a hard start date.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| July 2022 | Town holds a public informational meeting; construction is described as unlikely to begin any earlier than late 2024 |
| May 2023 | CMA Engineers presents two design alternatives plus a "no-build" comparison at the Wells Town Office |
| 2024 | CMA Engineers publishes a project recap estimating construction would begin winter 2025 or early 2026 |
| June 30, 2026 | Town holds an update meeting at the Wells Public Library on design progress; preliminary design work is still underway |
Read across that timeline and the pattern is a project that keeps refining its own estimate rather than one that's stalled. Each meeting has added real engineering work: subsurface investigations, environmental permitting, hydrology modeling. What it hasn't added yet is a construction date residents can circle on a calendar.
Why This Isn't a Simple Deck Swap
A few things make this bridge harder to replace than a typical road structure.
- The site is bordered by Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge land on both the north and south sides, which brings federal review into a project that would otherwise be a straightforward municipal job.
- GZA GeoEnvironmental has been brought in specifically to investigate subsurface conditions at the bridge and along the roadway approaches, work that determines what kind of foundation the new structure can actually sit on.
- The design team is evaluating whether to raise the elevation of the bridge and roadway to account for future sea level rise, which means the engineers first have to agree on how much sea level rise to plan for. That's a modeling question, not a construction one, and it takes time to settle before anyone pours concrete.
This is also not the first time infrastructure serving Drakes Island has needed a full rebuild because of where it sits. A few years back, the Kennebunk, Kennebunkport, Wells Water District replaced an aging 80-year-old, 10-inch waterline that ran under the same marsh, swapping it for a new 16-inch line installed beneath the Barrier Beach Trail at Wells Reserve. That project also took careful staging to avoid disrupting the marsh and the trail system above it. Anything that crosses this particular stretch of wetland moves on marsh time, not construction-season time.
Carol Murray, the town's Public Works Director, put the invitation to residents plainly at one of the early meetings: "We would like to hear from everyone regarding their thoughts and expectations for a new bridge." That's been the operating approach since 2022: bring the Drakes Island community, the refuge, the Wells Reserve, and Maine DEP into the design process together rather than presenting a finished plan and asking for sign-off.
Partners Involved, By Name
The project brings together an unusually wide group for a single bridge:
- Town of Wells, as the project lead
- CMA Engineers, the town's engineering consultant
- GZA GeoEnvironmental, handling subsurface investigation
- Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge and US Fish & Wildlife Service
- Wells Reserve at Laudholm
- Maine Department of Environmental Protection
- Members of the Drakes Island community, who have representation in the project's communication planning group
That list is long because the site touches conservation land, tidal wetlands, and a residential community all at once. Every one of those stakeholders has a legitimate say in how the new crossing gets built.
What This Actually Means If You Use That Road
If you're driving out to Drakes Island this fall, expect the bridge you've always crossed. Nothing in the public record points to a construction start before the design work finishes, and the design work is still moving through review as of this year. The 2024 estimate of a winter 2025 or early 2026 start has already been overtaken by events.
The most reliable way to track this isn't a secondhand post on a neighborhood group or an old contractor blog with a date that's since slipped. The town maintains a dedicated project page on wellstown.org with meeting summaries, presentation slides, and links to recorded video from each public session. That page gets updated as the design phase progresses, which makes it a better source than any prediction floating around from a year or two ago.
Why It's Worth Understanding, Even If You Don't Cross That Bridge Often
Wells has a lot of marsh, and a lot of infrastructure that has to work around it rather than through it. The Drakes Island Bridge is the most visible example right now, but the same careful, slow-moving process shows up anywhere a road, a waterline, or a culvert meets protected wetland in this town. It's not inefficiency. It's what building responsibly next to a national wildlife refuge actually looks like in practice, and it's a useful thing to understand if you spend any time in the marshes, trails, or beaches that make this stretch of coast what it is.
Whether you've crossed that bridge every week for twenty years or you're still learning which roads slow down at high tide, that kind of local detail is exactly what a quick search doesn't hand you. Brooke Peterson keeps an eye on projects like this one across Wells and Ogunquit because they shape daily life here long before they show up in a listing description. Reach out any time you want the real story behind a property, a road, or a stretch of shoreline.
