“It should be that simple.”ĭetermining savings on the S.R. “If I know I’ve got a similar bridge, I’m not going longer than 40 days, and honestly if we really want to get it done quicker, we just need to tell the contractor to reduce the time,” he says. We had to convince them this is something we can do.”ĭuvall says knowing the total working-days figure will help planning for similar projects. “It’s not just proving it to ourselves and to the contractor you can do it quicker, but it’s also proving it to our field people. “Sixty days was a huge win for us,” DuVall says. The project required only 60 days of road closure, with actual work on the structure lasting just 41 days. Each was completed in an 80-hour period in which the roadways were closed, mostly during weekends to limit traffic impact. The Rhode Island Department of Transportation, for example, replaced two bridges last September, the East Shore Expressway Bridge and the McCormick Quarry Bridge, using this slide-in method. Many of these efforts have centered on building superstructure components in temporary staging areas next to the bridge being replaced. State departments of transportation across the country have been working in recent years on their ABC techniques. The agency offered an additional $1.5 million if the work was completed May 25, an additional $2 million for May 21, and an additional $200,000 for each day completed before May 21, with a maximum amount of $3.1 million. Matthews to complete the project this month. Upon the original design, GDOT announced the project would be completed by June 15, but to compress the deadlines further, the agency offered incentives to C.W. Nathan Deal, gave GDOT the green light to speed things even more, as the agency did not have to follow the normal process of environmental review, and it was completing a reconstruction within an existing structural footprint. That federal help, along with a disaster declaration issued by Georgia Gov. Some of the initial costs were offset by $10 million in emergency relief funds from the Federal Highway Administration. “This is a very expensive product and is not something we typically use in all of our projects, but this will expedite the construction progress,” she says. To hasten the project even more, the agency decided to use 24-hour accelerated curing concrete, according to GDOT Chief Engineer Meg Pirkle. The bridge design team, made up of 15 to 20 engineers, worked the next two days over a weekend to develop plans for the entire bridge replacement. About 24 hours after the collapse, the agency sent the redesigned beam plans to the contractor and the beam fabricator to start making the beams. So GDOT’s bridge engineers had to incorporate the current beam design with the other elements of the existing deck and column designs. “We had to go pull our resources in, pull what information we had on the structure itself, communicate with the field to find out where the damage was localized to.” “We were also contacting our employees that we needed to bring in the office as well, so we could start preparing for whatever was going to come out of the incident,” he adds. Staffers on site gathered as much information as possible to determine their first steps. “Within minutes of learning about the incident, we all started to communicate and move into the site,” says GDOT State Bridge Engineer Bill DuVall. The I-85 bridge collapse required immediate response. This front-end approach is transparent to the traveling public, which is focused on getting its bridge, and getting it now. Contractors that either have design engineers on staff, or who partner with design firms, have the edge in taking on large ABC jobs. By combining the design and construction into one contract, agencies can cut construction time and lower project costs. On the management side, the acceleration of a bridge job comes in the form of a design-build contract.
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