Duxbury’s plan to repair the Powder Point bridge by wrapping the deteriorating piles with gray fiberglass shells may be in jeopardy and parts of the wooden frame may have to be replaced with steel, the town manager announced Monday night.

Town Manager Richard MacDonald explained the issues surrounding the recent closure of the 25-year old wooden bridge at the board of selectmen’s meeting.  He said there are four deteriorated piles, or vertical poles, that must be repaired or replaced with steel ones.

The state Department of Transportation recommended the bridge be closed until those piles are fixed. MacDonald took that one step further and ordered the bridge closed to keep the public safe.

Currently, the bridge is open to pedestrian and bike access but closed to all vehicles.

Town officials and the local bridge committee met with the state DOT last week to discuss the problems and will meet with them again Wednesday.

At Wednesday’s meeting, the state DOT will either approve or reject the town’s plan to wrap severely deteriorated piles with fiberglass shells filled with grout. The fiberglass jackets would be tinted with a gray epoxy coating to blend into the color of the iconic wooden bridge.

At the recommendation of the bridge committee, voters at the March town meeting approved $2.4 million to wrap 160 severely deteriorated piles with fiberglass and address issues with the cap beam connections, which are the cause of the bridge’s lowered load rating (from 15 tons to 8 tons). At town meeting, the bridge committee reported that 44 percent of the cap beams, or 477 out of 1,090 connections, have some problems with how they fit on top of the piles and that repairing the capbeam connections would raise the bridge’s load rating.

The bridge committee said it considered other alternatives, such as replacing the entire bridge or replacing only the worn piles, but felt a new bridge would be very expensive and cause a long disruption to the public’s access to Duxbury beach.

The bridge was last replaced in 1987.

Selectman Shawn Dahlen said that after town meeting approved the pile wrapping project, it was reviewed by the DOT in Boston, but has languished on the desk of the regional DOT in Taunton since before August.

Since it had been two years between inspections, the DOT wanted to re-inspect the bridge and found a “significant increase” in the rate of deterioration of the piles. It also declared that more than the 160 piles are in need of repair.

The piles have the most amount of wear between mean high water and the mud line, Dahlen said, adding that the bridge deck is in very good shape.

MacDonald said he is very concerned about the bridge as he wants to get it reopened as soon as possible to emergency vehicles and the public. However, he said it is a complicated problem.

“There are many, many facets to this fix,” he said. “But we have to take action to fix the four piles.”

The first step, he said, is for the state to approve the wrapping repair to the four worst piles. If it does, then the work must begin immediately, because it cannot be done in weather colder than 40 degrees.

If the DOT rejects the fiberglass wrap fix, then the four piles will be replaced with steel ones.

“The (state) engineer there wasn’t completely sold on the carbon wrapping methodology,” said Selectman Shawn Dahlen. “He proposed driven steel piles on both sides fully supporting the decking.”

This, he said, “will not be an aesthetically pleasing solution.”

As the scope of the project increases, so will the cost, said MacDonald. It is likely that next year voters will be asked for more funds to repair the bridge.

However, at this point, MacDonald is unsure what form that repair will take: fiberglass wrapping of the existing piles or steel pile replacements for all the worn piles.