ALBANY COUNTY — The long-awaited rail-trail bridge was put into place in late June but buckled on July 12.

“After concrete decking was being poured on a portion of the Albany County Rail Trail Bridge this morning in Slingerlands, the bridge buckled,” said Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy’s office in a statement on Wednesday afternoon.

“No one was injured or hurt,” it went on. “Construction has temporarily stopped on the bridge until an investigation is conducted to determine what happened and why.”

The original bridge — signs showed its height to be 11 feet, 2 inches — had been repeatedly struck by trucks traveling on Route 85.

Albany County acquired the bridge in 2009, as part of its purchase of the nine-mile stretch of railway that runs between the Port of Albany and Voorheesville that became the Helderberg-Hudson Rail Trail.

Built in 1912, the bridge had been in rough shape for some time. In 2019, the county said the bridge had been struck by vehicles passing beneath it nine times in the past 11 years. And it was struck several more times since.

A 2008 report said that the bridge’s structural steel and much of its concrete were in “very poor condition.”

A 2017 inspection by the New York State Department of Transportation said that the structure was in such bad shape, its deficiencies could “significantly impact” the bridge’s “load carrying capacity.” In 2018, the county made temporary repairs to the bridge.

And in 2019, the county decided on a $1.9 million plan to remove the 42-foot wide existing bridge and replace it with a two-girder structure that is 14-feet wide, raising the structure to 15 feet, 6 inches above the roadway to meet state requirements.

Construction on the new bridge was to start in the summer of 2020 but was delayed by both the pandemic and litigation.

The Enterprise reported last August that the cost had about doubled from the original $1.9 million because of legal challenges and having to relocate buried cable.