The Missouri Dept. of Transportation had $18 million to replace original voided concrete slab bridges at three locations on Interstate 70 in Columbia. MoDOT got the new bridges—and then some.
Parsons and contractor Emery Sapp & Sons teamed up on the current bridge sliding project in Columbia, a busy city of about 120,000 located smack in the middle of the state. The ongoing project is on a stretch of Interstate highway that averages 80,000 vehicles per day, “we have had all four lanes moving during daylight hours,” says Chip Jones, project manager with Columbia-based Emery Sapp. “Even during the bridge slides, we maintained four lanes of movement, which was extremely important based on the traffic count. We knew that from MoDOT; it was one of their stressing points in their proposal when we were bidding it.”
I-70 through Columbia is as much a local road as it is an Interstate highway. “The team has done a great job of keeping that traffic flow going,” says Travis Koestner, assistant district engineer, MoDOT Central District. “Anytime during the day, traffic can go at least 50 miles per hour on two lanes in each direction, which is pretty critical, because anytime during the day you have less than two lanes in one direction, you back up traffic there. We know that from experience. Pretty well how the team won the job is that they had the fewest impacts on the traveling public while doing the project.”
Replacing the old structures required tricky work, says Jones. “The bridges there were sound structures, but they were worn out. They did their lifetime plus, so they needed to be replaced,” says the contractor. “Part of our proposal and the reason MoDOT did the design-build was to see who could build the better mousetrap for the local traffic underneath.”
To read the whole story click the link below.
ENR MIDWEST – ESS I-70 bridge repair article
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