Tag Archives: pontoons

News, Transportation

Road News: Mercer Exit Closure, Cracked 520 Pontoons, Tunnel Tolls

Traffic on I-5 at Mercer Street may or may not be horrible this weekend, says Seattle’s Department of Transportation. Though there’s a full weekend closure of the I-5 on- and off-ramps at Mercer Street scheduled to start today, June 7, at 11 p.m. (and last until 5 a.m. Monday), the work is dependent on the weather. If you need to use the I-5 Mercer exit or onramp, pray for rain.

If you’re planning on attending the ballet tonight, expect delays as you leave the show. If the closure occurs, crews will install new drainage facilities, repair the offramp roadway base (then repave and stripe it), install guardrails on both ramps, and continue working on sign bridges across the ramps. To confirm what’s happening, check Seattle’s live traffic map. 10,000 people are expected at Key Arena for SPU’s graduation ceremonies Sunday afternoon — if they haven’t heard about the Mercer exit, I-5 could be nasty.

PS: If you work near the Federal Building downtown, you may want to clear out before the Protest for South Africa March arrives in time for today’s rush hour. If you negotiate that successfully, do not drive toward Fremont, where the Fremont 5K and Briefcase Relay begins at 6 p.m.

In 520 bridge news: “Two of the four cracked pontoons for the new Highway 520 bridge will be towed back out of Lake Washington and hoisted aboard dry docks — where engineers think they can be fixed faster than if they stay in the lake,” reports the Seattle Times‘ Mike Lindblom, who also says the cracks are due to design errors by state engineers. Repairs are said likely to run in the tens of millions of dollars, which may erase the project’s contingency budget. (More on the cracked pontoon saga here.) The bridge’s completion is being pushed back as well.

On the SR 99 tunnel front: PubliCola has been following the blowback from tunnel toll projections. Tolls were initially supposed to bring in $400 million, but that was revised to $200 million, and then to $165 million. But “King, Eide, and Clibborn informed OFM that they’re expecting the full $200 million from tolling, meaning they have no intention of authorizing $35 million to pick up the tab on extra costs for Seattle’s tunnel project,” says PubliCola, intimating as well that any bad news for tunnel funding is good news for Mayor McGinn’s re-election campaign.

News, Transportation

Both of WSDOT’s Seattle Megaprojects Off to a Bumpy Start

Giant cranes lift the 57.5-foot-diameter cutterhead into place on the SR 99 tunnel boring machine in Japan. (Photo: WSDOT)
Giant cranes lift the 57.5-foot-diameter cutterhead into place on the SR 99 tunnel boring machine in Japan. (Photo: WSDOT)

For most of 2012, the Washington Department of Transportation was watchdogged by KOMO News because of cracks found in new pontoons for the new 520 bridge. Now the Seattle Times‘ Mike Lindblom reports that Bertha, the 7,000-ton tunnel boring machine, purpose-built for digging the SR 99 tunnel beneath Seattle, sustained damage during its initial testing in Japan.

A January 23, 2013, update from WSDOT read, “She was performing well until last week, when crews discovered that something wasn’t quite right with her main drive unit, which rotates the cutterhead. It appears there was insufficient clearance between a rotating and stationary portion of the main drive unit, which resulted in damage to some of its components.”

Said Lindblom: “Testing was to be finished Dec. 25. As of this week, Hitachi Zosen crews in Osaka are disassembling and diagnosing the drive system.” (Sidebar: Although Bertha is, for a little while, the world’s largest-diameter TBM, it’s not a Big Bertha reference; the machine is named for Bertha Knight Landes, Seattle’s only female mayor.)

Bertha’s Twitter account has so far made no reference to its need for repair, or who’s paying for it. But in fact taxpayers are not on the hook yet. Seattle Tunnel Partners (STP) doesn’t officially take ownership of Bertha from Hitachi Zosen until the TBM has made it through about 1,000 feet of Seattle soil with no issues. Even then, says  said Linea Laird, WSDOT’s administrator for the Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Program, “More than 90 percent of STP’s work will be performed for a fixed price.”

Meanwhile, cracks in pontoons and mistakes in construction continue to plague WSDOT’s 520 bridge replacement project. In December, WSDOT announced that although specified “hooked” rebar had been left out of three pontoons, they would “structurally adequate” anyway. That omission is, of course, troubling because the rebar in question was supposed to help prevent cracking due to stress.

In an earlier update, in mid-December, titled “Continued progress on SR 520 east approach bridge piers,” WSDOT mentioned that part of that progress was tear-down of a new 58-foot-tall concrete column that had been built with too little concrete over its reinforcing steel skeleton. That was on contracting team Kiewit/General/Manson’s dime.

The state has been pressing for an ambitious finish to replacement of the floating section of the bridge, by late 2014, which presumably was a factor in transportation chief Paula Hammond’s decision not to reject the cracking pontoons shipped so far, proclaiming them mostly cosmetic and of no danger to pontoon integrity. But today Mike Lindblom noted on Twitter:

News, Politics, Transportation

New 520 Floating Bridge’s Pontoons are “Disaster,” Inspector Tells KOMO

WSDOT photo taken during the SR 520 pontoon media tour on Nov. 14, 2012.

KOMO News has more allegations from a former inspector, who says that the construction quality of the pontoons for replacement 520 bridge make it a “disaster waiting to happen.” His fate is instructive, especially when it comes to the state Department of Transportation’s response to KOMO inquiries.

WSDOT says, for instance: “WSDOT’s SR 520 construction contracts include multiple requirements for Quality Assurance (QA) managers and other Quality Assurance staff.” That sounds reassuring, but when you read their documentation, you discover that construction firm Kiewit, the “Design-Builder,” is responsible for all “QA and QC for design.”

WSDOT provides Quality Verification (QV) staff, but they get to see the finished results, when there’s significantly more at stake in ordering Kiewit to redo a piece. In this case, with cracks–and leaks–appearing in the pontoons, Kiewit is being asked to fix them. It is not clear how the firm can “fix” instances of the wrong rebar being used, misplaced, or left out entirely.

How this process seems to have played out is that the whistleblowing QA inspector was hired by a subcontractor to Kiewit to oversee construction. After he began writing up non-compliant construction methods, he was reprimanded, he says, and finally laid off after Kiewit complained about his sticklerism. (This is a similar dynamic reported by building inspectors who report shoddy condo construction. Your dance card empties out.)

WSDOT, troublingly, seems unhumbled by an August 2012 performance audit (pdf) that noted: “In general, it appears the Quality Management Plan is not being adhered to by KG and not being enforced by QA or QV.”

This all follows on KOMO’s earlier reporting that two experts agreed the first six pontoons should be “do-overs.” KOMO’s watchdogging had already gotten a promise from Governor Gregoire that an independent expert panel would review the pontoons. (In the Seattle Times, Secretary of Transportation Paula Hammond seemed impervious to alarm, pooh-poohing the issue of cracks in the pontoons: “I have no reason to believe we are going to reject pontoons.”)

Fixed and problem solved? KOMO’s Problem Solvers have since discovered that concrete in the next cycle of pontoons is cracking, as well.

Finally, you might ask what the hurry is? WSDOT has adopted a furious pace in shipping the pontoons, despite that fact that $1.4 billion in funding for the project remains to be found. Despite predicting traffic volumes of between 90,000 and 100,000 cars per day in the first year of tolling on 520, WSDOT reported that an average of 63,500 cars crossed the bridge weekdays, January to June 2012.

A recent budget update sliced $522 million from the project’s original $4.65 billion price, reducing it to $4.1 billion, which should help slightly with subpar toll revenue. But ultimately, moving money from pot to pot leads to stories like these: WSDOT is also said to have reduced the amount it was to pay MOHAI for its land to $4 million from $18 million (when I asked for details, a WSDOT communications officer told me she’d get back to me after a meeting on that topic, and did not).

News, Transportation

Foes of SR 520 Bridge-Embiggening File Opening Brief in Federal Lawsuit

East approach of the new 520 bridge. You can hardly tell it's there. (Rendering: WSDOT)

The 6-lane expansion of the SR 520 bridge can’t hardly get a legal break without another challenge popping up. First of all, Washington State Patrol troopers have been ticketing overweight trucks crossing the bridges around Aberdeen. The Daily World reports: “A single over-the-weight limit trip on the Chehalis River Bridge can cost a trucking company upwards of a $17,000 fine.” Repeated fines can lead to an impounded truck.

Brundage Bone Concrete Pumping truckers, contracted to work on the 520 pontoons, were having to drive a half-hour out of their way to avoid the Chehalis River Bridge, until owner  Jim Wright secured a weight-limit exemption from the Washington Department of Transportation. The new Montlaker site cried foul at WSDOT acting so expeditiously to waive limits for its own project, without granting them equally to other concerns.

In his blog post at the Seattle Times, Mike Lindblom writes: “On the $4.65 billion Highway 520 project, the state spent 14 years and $263 million from 1997-2011 on outreach, designs and preliminary engineering. For $263 million, the state could have funded a new bridge in Grays Harbor, with millions left over.”

Now, the Coalition for a Sustainable 520 has filed their opening brief in a federal suit against WSDOT. In an email to supporters, Fran Conley outlines the arguments that the brief makes:

It points out that federal and state laws require the agencies to evaluate reasonable alternatives, and that this was not done… For instance, adequate review was not done on a tolled, transit-optimized 4 lanes. It points out that federal and state law require avoidance of taking public land, and that adequate analysis of alternatives to taking our beautiful waterways and natural areas was not done. It points out that the state did not do a cost-benefit analysis that is required by state law and that is supposed to inform the decision-makers.

The Coalition admits that “the existing 4-lane bridge is in danger of collapse” in their brief, but argues that it’s stretching truth and necessity to call the new 520 project “6-lane” when it tops out at 12 lanes (in Montlake, as it connects with various on- and off-ramps). “For instance, just east of Montlake Boulevard,” they point out, “the project’s width is approximately 250 feet.”

That’s a notional 250 feet, of course, since WSDOT has only gathered the funds to build a bridge from Medina to about Foster Island. If WSDOT can’t find that extra $2 billion in time, the Coalition worries that the new bridge will meet the Seattle approach in its current form, creating a choke point. Instead, the Coalition argues, pre-construction tolling on 520 has already shown that a 4-lane rebuild of the bridge (with better pedestrian and bicycle access) is enough to handle the amount of traffic that people are willing to pay for.

Failing that, or in anticipation of greater cross-lake traffic need, the Coalition proposes that a 6-lane solution with dedicated light rail or BRT is still vastly superior to the selected alternative, because transit doesn’t require all those on- and off-ramps that generate such a large footprint from Montlake to I-5. (It remains unclear to me, no matter how many lanes are employed, how I-5 and Montlake Boulevard congestion won’t simply feed back eastward on the new bridge, since there isn’t money to enlarge their connection points.)

Those are the more practical and pragmatic concerns raised. There are also a host of environmental issues that it is hard to feel WSDOT didn’t minimize in their attempt to increase vehicular capacity (again, notionally–fitting more cars onto a bridge that is stoppered at both ends by congestion isn’t the kind of capacity that people typically pay more than $4 billion for). It’s more than a little striking that WSDOT is embarking on half-building another megaproject at the scene of the “ramps to nowhere,” built to connect to the R.H. Thomson Expressway, before the money ran out. Is that what they call institutional memory?