Crews repairing the heavily traveled Michigan Street bridge near South Bend’s Leeper Park have disappeared.

But that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped working.

The project has entered its “troll” stage. All the work is taking place underneath the bridge.

“We’re focusing on the underside of the bridge and there’s numerous cracks on the underside of the bridge,” said INDOT Spokesman Matt Deitchley. “It’s an old bridge so that’s what we’re doing right now, we’re sealing the cracks on the 100 year old bridge.”

Up top, all road closings and traffic restrictions are gone. Down below, boat traffic can no longer pass by the bridge because the river is clogged with a barge and some scaffolding.

“It's a difficult situation obviously working underneath a bridge, so for a time there they were using boats to go back and forth, and then the river got a little low so they were able to, as you can see, walk out pretty far to get out to the barges, but its obviously a different kind of animal, when you deal with something underneath the bridge like this,” said Deitchley.

The bridge project should be done by the end of November. Until that time weight restriction will remain in place.

That means the bridge is closed to trucks weighting more than 20,000 pounds.