Wrightsville Beach Bridge Project Updates: What Changes First

"I use this bridge almost every day of my life," Campbell Carter told a WWAY reporter back in March, talking about his daily crossing on and off the island. Six months later, that sentence still describes most of Wrightsville Beach. What's changed is which bridge people should actually be worried about, and it isn't the one most residents assumed.

For over a year, the conversation around the island's three-bridge replacement project has centered on Causeway Drive, the main route most people picture when they think about getting on and off Wrightsville Beach. It makes sense. Causeway Drive is the bridge tourists cross, the one with the drawbridge, the one that shows up in every mental map of "how do I get to the island." But if you've been half-listening to the bridge project news over the summer, you may have missed the detail that matters most right now: Causeway Drive is the last of the three bridges to change, and it keeps two lanes open in each direction the entire time it's under construction. The bridge that's actually closing streets and rerouting traffic this fall is a much smaller one, over a much smaller waterway, that most people don't think about until they can't get across it.

The bridge closing first isn't the one you'd guess

The project, listed with NCDOT as Project HB-0040, replaces three aging structures: the Causeway Drive bridge over Banks Channel, and two bridges on West Salisbury Street, one over Lees Cut and a longer one over Banks Channel. All three were built in the 1960s and '70s and have been kept running on repairs rather than replacement for years.

Labor Day just passed, and that date mattered for a reason beyond the calendar. NCDOT had said publicly that the smaller West Salisbury Street bridge, the one over Lees Cut, would not close to traffic for replacement until after Labor Day. That window is now open. Construction on this bridge is expected to begin before the end of the year and take about a year to complete, and when it does, West Salisbury Street will close between Lookout Harbor and the eastern entrance to Pelican Drive for the duration.

Causeway Drive, meanwhile, is untouched during this phase. NCDOT and the Town have both confirmed that at least two travel lanes in each direction stay open on Causeway Drive throughout all three phases of construction, along with the multi-use path. That's the detail that gets lost in headlines about a "$105 million, three-bridge project." The Lees Cut closure is real and it will reroute anyone who normally cuts through that stretch of West Salisbury Street. The Causeway Drive gridlock people have been bracing for is still years away, and even then it's designed to avoid a full shutdown.

Here's how the three phases break down, based on the timeline NCDOT's Division 3 Engineer Trevor Carroll laid out at an August 14 press conference:

• Phase 1, Lees Cut Bridge: construction starts late 2026, runs about one year, closes West Salisbury Street from Lookout Harbor to the eastern entrance to Pelican Drive. Causeway Drive stays open, two lanes each direction.
• Phase 2, Salisbury Long Bridge over Banks Channel: starts summer 2027, closes West Salisbury Street from Lookout Harbor to North Lumina Avenue, though parking along that stretch stays open. Causeway Drive again keeps two lanes each direction.
• Phase 3, Causeway Drive Bridge: the new bridge is built in two halves north of the existing structure so traffic can shift over before the old bridge comes down. This phase runs from 2028 into 2030.

That last date is itself new information. As recently as this July, NCDOT was telling residents the project would wrap in late 2032, with each bridge built roughly two years apart. Carroll's August announcement, tied to a change in how NC allows NCDOT to structure contracts, moved the target finish to spring 2030, two years earlier than that July estimate. "What I'm sharing with you today is our projection," Carroll said at the press conference, careful to frame it as a goal rather than a guarantee. The total project cost sits at $105 million, split roughly between $70 million in construction and $35 million in land and right-of-way acquisition.

The part boaters will notice before drivers do

There's a second change coming this fall that has nothing to do with cars. Once construction on the Lees Cut bridge gets underway, the Town has confirmed that the Heide Trask Drawbridge, the swing span on Causeway Drive that boats pass under to reach the Intracoastal Waterway, will switch to opening only on the hour. Right now, openings happen more frequently and somewhat informally. For anyone who plans a day on the water around that schedule, the hourly window is the first real behavior change of the entire project, and it arrives months before a single car sees a detour sign.

The event calendar is where the fight actually is

If you want to know how seriously the town is taking the disruption, skip the traffic studies and look at what happened to the fall events calendar. In April, the Board of Aldermen voted 3-2 to reject three new events proposed by the Wrightsville Beach Longboard Association for summer 2026, including two surf contests and a surf festival with a movie night, citing a town policy against adding new summer events. The same meeting approved two of the association's recurring contests, but pushed them to October and November instead. Association president Shawn O'Donnell said afterward that the group plans to hold future events at a different beach while the bridge work continues.

The Town's Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee went further, proposing a moratorium on special events on town property and the beach strand for all of summer 2027, the stretch when Lees Cut and Salisbury Long Bridge construction are likely to overlap. Aldermen tabled a final decision on that moratorium, but agreed in the meantime to keep allowing events before Memorial Day and after Labor Day while construction is underway. The same reporting flagged that the island's Thanksgiving morning Turkey Trot could lose its usual route this fall, though no final call had been made public at the time.

None of this means the island goes quiet. It means the town is trying to protect its regular rhythms, the surf contests, the holiday race, the things residents plan their year around, while accepting that some of them will move, shrink, or shift season for a few years.

Life on the island keeps moving anyway

Worth remembering while all of this plays out: the island is still adding to itself, not just bracing for construction. Shark Bar & Kitchen near Johnnie Mercer's Pier opened a second-floor sushi spot this year, Red Cat Sushi, serving from 3 p.m. daily with a happy hour that runs half-off sushi from 3 to 5. And the building that used to house Waterman's Brewing has a new tenant this fall in Cabana Bar & Grill, a Caribbean and American-inspired spot opened by Clayton Gsell. Neither of those has anything to do with bridges or bonds or construction phases. They're just what a Tuesday on the island looks like right now, alongside everything else.

What to actually watch

If you want to track this without relying on secondhand summaries, NCDOT built a subscriber tool specifically for this project that sends email and text updates as construction milestones happen, and the Town of Wrightsville Beach keeps its own bridge replacement page updated with meeting notes, including a summary from the committee's most recent session on August 31 at the Public Safety Building on Bob Sawyer Drive. Both are better sources than word of mouth once flagging crews and lane closures start showing up on West Salisbury Street this fall.

The headline version of this story is "three bridges, years of construction, brace yourself." The version that actually matters if you live here is narrower: one closure on one street, starting soon, while the road most people use every day stays exactly as passable as it's always been, at least for now.

If you're weighing what a home near the island's bridges, the Loop, or the marina district is worth while all of this unfolds, or just want a straight answer about how a particular stretch of West Salisbury or Causeway Drive is likely to be affected, Jennifer Farmer and the team are always glad to talk it through. Open Your Door on the Coast.