\n
Officials now want all repair and reinforcement work done before reopening the bridge to anyone \u2014 a process projected to take 120 days from Feb. 14, when repair work began. The new target date is June 14.<\/p>\n
At that point, the bridge will be safe for heavy trucks, as well as cars and pedestrians, said Casey Shell, the Oklahoma Transportation Department\u2019s chief engineer.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019d rather stand here before you today and say, \u2018We\u2019re going to close this and we\u2019re going to make life miserable for people,\u2019 than stand before you four months later and say, \u2018We\u2019re so sorry, 10 people got injured or died,\u2019\u201d said Terri Angier, Transportation Department spokeswoman.<\/p>\n
Shell said he feels terrible about the delay \u2014 personally having seen the \u201cshock and fear\u201d on the faces of Lexington and Purcell residents when transportation officials discussed the bridge\u2019s closure at town meetings. Resident after resident told about the extreme hardships created by the bridge\u2019s Jan. 31 closure, which turned a short jaunt over the Canadian River that links the two communities into a 40-mile trip.<\/p>\n
State transportation officials say they feel even worse because they inadvertently created the current crisis by failing to recognize and tell a Sapulpa contractor who did renovation work on the bridge last year that a few members of one truss were made out of a rare manganese alloy steel.<\/p>\n
The contractor welded on brackets that were intended to strengthen the bridge. But welding on manganese alloy steel weakens the material and makes it subject to cracking under stress, Shell said.<\/p>\n
Cracks have appeared around last year\u2019s welds.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the part that I feel horrible about,\u201d Shell said. \u201cIt could have been avoided had we known. … We don\u2019t have a single crack that isn\u2019t associated with a weld out there.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the thing that would make transportation officials feel much worse is if the bridge were to collapse. That\u2019s a real danger with fracture-critical bridges like the 76-year-old bridge that joins Purcell and Lexington, because there are not load-bearing redundancies built into the design, Shell said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen this one fails, it\u2019s going to be no warning,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to break, and that\u2019s going to be the end of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Concerns of more cracking<\/strong><\/p>\nTen crack locations had appeared on critical bridge trusses by Feb. 14 when the Transportation Department awarded a two-tiered, incentive-laden $10.8 million repair contract to Manhattan Road & Bridge Co. of Muskogee.<\/p>\n
The number of crack locations since has grown to 41 \u2014 something transportation engineers say they didn\u2019t expect and fear could grow, especially if traffic is reintroduced to the bridge before all 264 areas weakened by welding have been addressed.<\/p>\n
Manhattan\u2019s repair contract called for the construction company to make emergency repairs to the 10 crack-damaged areas within 45 days so the bridge could reopen to passenger car traffic.<\/p>\n
The contractor was then to continue reinforcing all 264 areas on the trusses weakened by welding, with an ultimate goal of reopening the bridge to all traffic within 120 days of the start of work.<\/p>\n
When the repair project was designed, engineers thought the 10 original crack locations were tension cracks caused by tightening bolts attached to rods that stretched between brackets across weakened areas, Shell said. The location of the cracks made that the logical conclusion.<\/p>\n
Engineers thought that by halting those cracks, bolting plates across the damaged areas and loosening all tension bolts put on during the previous renovation, they could prevent further cracking and allow traffic back on the bridge while other preventive renovation work was being done, Shell said.<\/p>\n
The most recent unpleasant surprise has been that additional cracks have appeared around other welds, even after the bolts were loosened to remove tension, he said.<\/p>\n
Engineers now think those cracks are being caused by the weakened metal expanding and contracting during Oklahoma\u2019s dramatic temperature swings, Shell said.<\/p>\n
Engineers fear that fixing the 41 crack locations they know about currently won\u2019t be enough to protect the public.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce we get these all addressed \u2014 if we can ever catch up with them all \u2014 there\u2019s no assurance that it\u2019s not going to continue to crack,\u201d Shell said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can address the ones we know are there, but it\u2019s the ones that continually pop up. You can\u2019t do a pre-emptive strike, because you don\u2019t know which one to go to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Angier said, \u201cThe information is changing for us by the hour. It\u2019s developing as we speak.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shell said officials feared that if they continued to push for the early reopening, they would be creating a scenario where the bridge would have to be ordered closed and reopened again on an irregular and unpredictable basis as new cracks appeared.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really didn\u2019t want to subject the people to that, because I think that\u2019s more torturous than knowing that it\u2019s closed and you deal with it until it\u2019s opened continually,\u201d Shell said.<\/p>\n
Incentives remain<\/strong><\/p>\nTransportation Department Executive Director Mike Patterson said the good news is that the repair contractor is making great progress, with work going faster than expected.<\/p>\n
By eliminating the 45-day early reopening goal, the department has freed up the contractor to do the repairs in the most efficient order possible, which could quicken the overall time necessary to complete the project, Shell said.<\/p>\n
Repairs must be made from lifts that operate beneath the bridge, because of weight restrictions on the bridge itself. If heavy rains were to cause the Canadian River to rise, that could delay the project.<\/p>\n
By eliminating the 45-day goal for completing work on locations where cracks have formed, the contractor is free to start at the river and work his way outward, which eliminates some of that weather delay risk, Shell said.<\/p>\n
Shell said even though the bridge will not reopen to passenger traffic after the initial 10 crack locations are fixed, the $2,500-an-hour incentive or punishment to the bridge contractor for beating or missing the 45-day target for initial repairs will remain, as well as the $1,500-an-hour incentive or punishment for beating or missing the 120-day target for total completion.<\/p>\n
Shell said he is \u201cfully confident\u201d that the bridge will be safe once all 264 weakened areas have been addressed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n
\u201cI\u2019m driving on it first,\u201d Patterson said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I met Friday morning with Oklahoma Department of Transportation Director Mike Patterson, Chief Engineer Casey Shell and Representative Bobby Cleveland to look over the work progress on the James C. Nance Bridge. The bridge connects the two communities and is one of three bridges that connects Cleveland County to McClain County over the Canadian River. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[734,701,703,732,702,710,704,733],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cleveland-county","tag-bobby-cleveland","tag-bridge-repairs","tag-james-c","tag-lexington","tag-nance","tag-odot","tag-purcell","tag-rod-cleveland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rodcleveland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rodcleveland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rodcleveland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rodcleveland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rodcleveland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/rodcleveland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":363,"href":"https:\/\/rodcleveland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions\/363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rodcleveland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rodcleveland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rodcleveland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}