BUCKSPORT – Black Friday.

That’s how Leon Seymour, executive director of the Friends of Fort Knox, refers to July 11, the day the Maine Department of Transportation posted weight limits on the Waldo-Hancock Bridge.

Like many businesses along Route 1 that depend on the heavy tourist traffic that generally crosses that bridge, the fort, one of Maine’s most popular state parks, is feeling the effects of that posting. The average July attendance at Fort Knox over the past seven years has been 15,256, Seymour said Tuesday.

“Today, with about 10 days left in July, we’re at about seven thousand,” he said. “Beginning in July, we could see that attendance was a bit off, but certainly not more than five percent. We have days here now where we’re clearly down by as much as 50 percent.”

At the Sail-In Restaurant near the Prospect end of the bridge, co-owner Paul Dyer is dealing with a similar drop in business, business that he counts on to get him through the lean winter months.

“We still get local people, and we’re getting some regular travelers who regularly stop to eat here,” Dyer said. “But a lot of traffic is being detoured. People are going to detour to get away from these delays.”

Construction crews on Tuesday continued to remove narrow concrete sidewalks to lighten the bridge.

The weight limit posting has kept most of the large tractor-trailers away from the bridge, according to the Sgt. Jan Reynolds of the Maine State Police. On Monday, for example, troopers diverted only eight vehicles on the Prospect side of the bridge, and none on the Verona side.

But the sense in the area is that other, noncommercial vehicles also are avoiding the area.

Part of the problem, according to Linda Plourde at the Bucksport Area Chamber of Commerce, is the signs that the DOT has erected to warn truckers that the bridge’s weight limit is 24,000 pounds. The signs, placed on roads as far south as Portland, warn that the bridge has been posted for weight limit.

“The message is ‘avoid Routes 1 and 3,”‘ Plourde said. “At the bottom, it says that it’s for vehicles over 24,000 pounds. That’s the significant point, and people miss it. It’s not intended for plain vehicle traffic.”

The department is working on an addition to the sign that officials hope will address that problem, according to DOT spokesman Greg Nadeau.

Local business people will see that proposal at meetings scheduled for today, Nadeau said. If the public approves of the wording, DOT crews will add them to the posting signs throughout the state.

The meetings, all open to the public, will be held:

. At 3 p.m. at the Searsport Shores Campground. Representatives from the tourism industry will offer their ideas.

. At 4:30-6 p.m. at the Bucksport Public Safety Building. Questions from the press and the public will be answered by DOT officials.

. At 7 p.m. also at the Bucksport Public Safety Building, a Public Advisory Committee meeting will be held. The committee is a regional advisory committee to the DOT.

But some business owners blame not only the drop in traffic, but the delays at each end of the bridge for the decline they’re seeing in their businesses.

“Last weekend, we had bumper-to-bumper traffic out here,” Paul Carter, owner of Fort View Variety on Route 1 in Verona, said. “They wouldn’t let anyone in or out.”

In a normal summer, Carter said, he usually sells a tank load of gasoline every other day. Since the bridge was posted, he’s going three or four days between truckloads, the businessman said.

“We’ve suffered severely,” he said.

Although Andy Lacher, owner of BookStacks on Main Street, is reluctant to blame the slow summer on the bridge problems, he admits there is a “fear factor” there.

“People are afraid of it,” he said. “I hear it from people.”

Bucksport Mayor Lisa Whitney said the state also needs to make a strong commitment to market this region, which has been affected for three years running by construction projects. That effort has to start now and once the new bridge over the Penobscot River is built, the town official said.

“There needs to be an effort to inspire confidence in that bridge,” she said Tuesday. “If it’s safe, say it’s safe. Then there’s got to be a concentrated effort at the state level to market this region.”

Nadeau said the department will work with other state departments to develop information about the economic impact on the area, including traffic studies and will present some marketing information to business owners at the meetings today. Meanwhile, Dyer at the Sail-In Restaurant tries to keep his spirits up, but he worries about what the bridge posting is going to mean to his 55-year-old family business, noting that it will be three years before a new bridge is built.

“Even if people get the idea that the bridge is safe again, that’s still going to be in the back of their heads,” he said. “If they can go around, they’re going to.”