How many times have you heard that the Islands Expressway bridge is almost done?
If you commute between Savannah and Wilmington Island, Whitemarsh Island, or Talahi on a regular basis, you've probably lost count. The state has now told the public six different times over the last five years exactly when the second span over the Wilmington River would finally open to traffic. Five of those dates have already come and gone. The sixth, August 30, 2026, is now a week in the past as of this writing, and there's no confirmed public record yet showing whether it actually held. That pattern is the real story here, not the bridge itself.
Why the Old Bridge Had to Go
Before any of this construction started, Islands Expressway crossed the Wilmington River on a pair of mechanical bascule drawbridges, one built in 1963 and reused in part for a second span in 1989. Locally, the older span carried the name Sam Varnedoe Bridge, and as of 2018 it was described by Chatham County's Director of Public Works, Robert Drewry, as the last mechanical drawbridge left in the state. That drawbridge opened for boat traffic more than 3,800 times in a single reported year, and every one of those openings stopped car traffic cold in both directions.
The replacement project, awarded to Prince Contracting, LLC after the state issued its notice to proceed on February 2, 2018, was designed to end that. According to the contractor's own project page, the plan called for two new bridges nearly 1,900 feet long, rising about 90 feet above the Wilmington River, high enough that maritime traffic would never again force a car to stop and wait. The first of the two new spans opened to traffic in July 2022, right on an earlier version of schedule. The second span is the one that has spent the last several years missing its own finish line.
Six Target Dates in Four Years
Here's what the public record actually shows, pulled from state and local reporting as each new date was announced.
| When it was reported | New target for the second span |
|---|---|
| 2021 project update | 2024 |
| Original contract deadline | March 31, 2024 |
| September 2024, after the deadline was missed | Summer 2025 |
| December 2024 | First quarter of 2026 |
| April 2025, contractor's revised schedule | Second quarter of 2026 |
| April 2025, final contract amendment | August 30, 2026 |
Six different windows, each replacing the one before it, stretched across four years of public statements. The Chatham County engineering department's own project page still lists the second bridge as simply "underway," which is its own kind of tell. When the agency closest to the ground can't commit to a firmer word than that, the state-level announcements further up the chain are working from the same uncertainty.
The Fine That Kept Growing, Then Vanished
The part of this story that tells you the most about how these deadlines actually work isn't the schedule. It's the money.
Once the original March 31, 2024 deadline passed, GDOT began assessing liquidated damages against Prince Contracting at a rate of $5,089 per calendar day, a penalty meant to keep pressure on the contractor to finish. By April 24, 2025, 388 days had accrued at that rate, adding up to roughly $1.94 million in fines on the books.
Then GDOT and Prince Contracting reached an agreement: the state added time to the contract, and in exchange, the entire $1.94 million in accumulated penalties was wiped away. The fine didn't get collected. It got traded for a new deadline, the one that landed on August 30, 2026.
That's worth sitting with for a second. A penalty that looks like real accountability from the outside, nearly two million dollars in liquidated damages, turned out to have no actual cost attached to it once the two parties sat down to renegotiate. The fine clock exists, and it does grow, but growth alone hasn't been enough to force a finish. It's been a negotiating chip more than a punishment.
What This Has Actually Looked Like on the Ground
None of this has been abstract for the people who live along the corridor.
Wilmington Island resident Robert Callaway, who commutes the Expressway daily for his job, has described scraping the undercarriage liner off his own car on the road's bumps and construction transitions, on top of years of frustration watching the project slip. Ryon Thompson, who lives in the neighborhood directly behind the construction zone, has talked about the danger of merging out onto the Expressway now that his own children are approaching driving age, a worry he says he didn't expect to still have this many years into the project.
Safety has been a recurring concern beyond individual frustration. In the year following the first new span's opening in July 2022, Chatham County police recorded 36 accidents in the immediate area and issued 109 tickets, according to reporting at the time. Susan Brinkley, representing the Causton Bluff homeowners association, publicly asked GDOT for additional safety measures near the merge points as those accident numbers piled up. Whether that specific stretch has improved since is something only current traffic data would confirm, but it's the kind of detail that shows this project has never just been a line item on a state budget. It's been a daily hazard for the people whose driveways empty directly onto it.
The One Thing Actually Worth Watching Now
If you want to know when this bridge is genuinely finished, don't wait for another quote about steady traffic flow. Watch three things instead.
- Whether GDOT actually assesses new liquidated damages against Prince Contracting now that August 30, 2026 has passed, rather than negotiating them away again
- Whether Prince Contracting crews are still visibly active on the second span or have demobilized from the site
- Whether the old drawbridge structure has actually been removed, since a fully finished project requires demolition of the original spans, not just a shift in which lane you drive
The history here says the state's public language stays remarkably consistent no matter which deadline is currently in play. What changes, when it finally changes for real, will show up in whether the fine sticks this time, not in another press statement promising the same thing residents have been told since 2021.
If you've been commuting this corridor for years, you already know the shape of this story better than any outside account could tell you. That's exactly the kind of ground-level knowledge that matters when you're trying to understand a neighborhood beyond the surface, whether the question is a bridge, a school pickup line, or what a street actually feels like at 5:30 on a Tuesday. If you ever want to talk through what daily life looks like across Wilmington Island, Whitemarsh Island, Talahi, or the rest of the coastal communities east of Savannah, the team at McIntosh Realty Team is happy to talk shop, bridge included.
