On 22 April 1940, German bombers tried to destroy the new bridge, but missed and managed only to kill the 15-year-old boy Ingolf Helge Vatten on a bicycle several hundred meters away on Frei, and set the forest on fire on Nordlandet.

[2] The ferry was finally replaced with the undersea Freifjord Tunnel in 1992 as part of the Kristiansund Mainland Connection.

It was then made accessible again for pedestrians and cyclists, and protected as an important sample of Norwegian bridges built in the 1930s.

The main spans horizontal curvature was unusually tight, for a concrete cantilever bridge of the time.

On 18 March 2010, preliminary plans for a new 600-metre (2,000 ft) long replacement bridge were unveiled, as a part of a future highway to Kristiansund.