AN online petition calling on the Isle of Wight Council to scrap the troubled floating bridge and build another has gained hundreds of signatures in just a few hours.

The petition, addressed to the Isle of Wight Council's leader, Cllr Dave Stewart and its chief executive, John Metcalfe as well as other senior figures at the authority, claims the floating bridge has many design and engineering problems that can't be repaired or are too expensive to resolve.

The petition, launched by floating bridge stakeholders, follows revelations that the troubled bridge has cost £6.4 million so far with a bill of £539,000 alone to run a replacement launch service when the bridge is out of action.

The petition states: "Isle of Wight residents should not be paying for the mistakes of Council mismanagement for the next 30 years by being left with a substandard floating bridge and also by losing the extra money which the old floating bridge made regularly for the Council.

"Isle of Wight Council, get us another floating bridge that works properly and makes money again so you can fund our public services. Stop making bad decisions which hurt local businesses and Isle of Wight residents."

It goes on: "The Isle of Wight’s floating bridge has many design and engineering problems that can’t be fixed or are too expensive to resolve. The old floating bridge was extremely reliable, frequent, fit for purpose, and made extra money for the Isle of Wight Council.

"The Council having already forked out some £6.4 million appears to be happy wasting millions of pounds trying to fix problems that can’t be fixed, and ignoring others completely.

"Despite claims otherwise, the floating bridge is still making horrendous noises, cars are grounding, cables and chains snap, a big barge pushes it along many days a month, it overheats, and it gets stuck in the mud or strands people on the bridge when it can’t manoeuvre around a pile, amongst many other operational and design problems.

"It has faults because in many ways it is too big to operate in the local tides, weather, marine traffic, and other conditions. The floating bridge has not met its technical specification, nor has it met its many requirements."

In response to a petition, calling for the Isle of Wight Council to buy a new floating bridge, Cllr Ian Ward, Cabinet member for transport and infrastructure, said: "To suggest this council can go out and buy a new floating bridge is simply not practical and the petition calling for it to happen is frankly misleading and doesn’t address the reality of the situation.

"If the council stops using this floating bridge and decides to buy a new one, it will have to pay back £3.7 million to the Solent Local Enterprise Partnership who part funded the vessel with no guarantee we could sell the existing one.

"To design, procure, build and test a new floating bridge would cost around £5 million which is around half the usual £10 million capital budget of this council.

“This would impact on council capital spending across the Island including the school refurbishment programme and the building of affordable homes.

"The council will lose the revenue it gets from operating the floating bridge, which helps pay for much needed services now and into the future.

"The people of Cowes would be left without any floating bridge service for two years or more. This would lead to economic harm to both East and West Cowes and the staff who operate the floating bridge would have to be laid off.

"This present administration had just come into power when the new floating bridge entered service. We had no say or oversight in its design, which was decided upon by the previous administration.

"We continue to work towards finding solutions to make sure the vessel can operate in all tide conditions and good progress is being made to achieve this. We have already addressed noise issues.

"We dispute that the floating bridge is not a reliable service although we have always recognised it must be better. In September it operated at 89.5 per cent of its scheduled hours and in October it was 79.4 per cent. In previous months the percentage has been even higher at above 90 per cent."

The petition is available here.