CLAY COUNTY, Fla — Update: FDOT repairs finished ahead of schedule, and the Shands Bridge will not close the weekend of Feb. 9.
If you planned to take the Shands Bridge this weekend, you're going to instead need to plan for a longer trip on a different route.
Starting Friday night, the bridge connecting Clay and St. Johns Counties will close for road work, not opening until Monday morning. A closure is also planned for next weekend and the weekend after that.
The detour the Florida Department of Transportation wants you to take is over the Buckman Bridge, which is more than 20 miles from either side of the Shands Bridge. Traffic will detour via State Road 13, I-295 and U.S. 17.
Getting from one side of the Shands Bridge to the other using the detour is more than 50 miles and driving the whole detour takes over an hour.
The Shands Bridge will close Friday at 9 p.m. and won't open until Monday at 4 a.m. This will also happen next weekend and possibly the weekend after that if workers don't finish replacing the grating.
An FDOT spokesperson says 18,500 people drive the minute and a half across the bridge every weekday and even though fewer people drive it on weekends, the closure will cause some problems. They're urging you to plan ahead.
First Coast News met David Kelly on the Green Cove Springs side. He had just driven over the Shands Bridge to a doctor's appointment and was grateful he wasn't making the trip a few days later.
"We come from Suwanee County to see the urologist over here," Kelly said. "That's what I was telling her, this bridge is gonna be closed for three days. That's gonna be crazy."
Kristina Knowles owns a shop in Green Cove Springs. She says about a third of her customers usually cross the Shands Bridge. She expects to lose about a third of her business over the next few weekends.
"A significant amount of my customers actually cross over the Shands Bridge who come from the St. Johns and St. Augustine area just because we are so close to those people," Knowles said. "So I'm expecting that it's definitely going to have an impact on the amount of people that we see over the next few weekends."
There's also a bridge in Palatka, Memorial Bridge on U.S. 17, but it isn't closer than the Buckman Bridge.