The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation will build a temporary road on top of backfill to patch the gap in Interstate 95 left by the collapse of a bridge in northeast Philadelphia, officials announced Wednesday.
Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) said the approach is the fastest way to get the highway safely reopened. Recycled glass aggregate will be shipped to the site under police escort to fill the area that had been spanned by a pair of bridges. Permanent bridges will be constructed later.
“I want to get this road reopened as quickly as possible,” Shapiro said.
The costs of the project are still being calculated and Shapiro repeatedly declined to say when the temporary or permanent roads might open. The governor said the public will be able to watch progress on a live camera feed.
The northbound section of the bridge collapsed Sunday after a truck carrying 8,500 gallons of gasoline rolled over and caught fire underneath, killing the driver. The southbound bridge was deemed unsafe and is being demolished. The incident is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board but experts say the heat of the fire was probably enough to compromise the steel holding up the bridge.
The closed portion of highway saw about 160,000 vehicles a day. Its closure is leaving trucks facing long detours while snarling commutes in Philadelphia, adding to the urgency of reopening the road.
The Federal Highway Administration has released $3 million in emergency funds, officials announced Wednesday, while an emergency declaration Shapiro signed Monday made $7 million in state funds available.
Kim Roddis, a civil engineering professor at George Washington University, said opting for a temporary road will drive up the cost of rebuilding but will mean the highway can be restored far more quickly. She predicted it would shorten the time to reopen the road from months to weeks.
“This is a really great way to get the functionality back,” Roddis said. “This is the kind of thing that might get done in a military situation but we usually don’t do it because we want to be able to do the permanent fix.”
Roddis said the recycled glass material is similar to coarse sand and will allow the temporary road to function safely.
Pennsylvania Transportation Secretary Mike Carroll said the temporary road will have three lanes in each direction. The next phase of the project will involve building a new permanent crossing, removing the fill and restoring the exit ramp beneath the highway. The work will be carried out by Philadelphia firm Buckley & Company.
Shapiro said the demolition work is on schedule to be finished Thursday, faster than experts had told officials to expect. Backfill will begin arriving the same day, he said.
“We’re not wasting a single second,” Shapiro said.
Ryan Boyer, the business manager of Philadelphia Building & Construction Trades Council, said workers were prepared to be on-site around-the-clock.
While leaders in Pennsylvania wouldn’t set a timeline, similar bridges have been rebuilt in a matter of weeks. Officials say they have found that offering bonuses can be a useful tool in getting contactors to move quickly.
In 2017, a fire caused a section of Interstate 85 to collapse in Atlanta, disrupting travel for an average of 240,000 vehicles each day. The bridge was reconstructed in six weeks, more than a month ahead of schedule, according to the National Operations Center of Excellence, a transportation research group.
The contract for the work in Atlanta included bonuses of up to $3.1 million for early completion. The initial estimate was for the bridge to reopen by June 15, but crews finished the work by May 12.
A decade earlier, a tanker crash destroyed a portion of a San Francisco intersection known as The Maze. The California Department of Transportation set a target of reopening the highway within 50 days. The contract established that each early completion day would net the contractor $200,000, while missing the target would come with a $200,000-a-day penalty.
Workers were at the scene within an hour of the contract being signed and the job was done in less than a month, according to an FHWA account from the time.
But Roddis said limited access to the site in Philadelphia makes rebuilding more difficult, so opting for a two-stage plan makes sense.
“It is a creative solution,” she said.
(c) 2023, The Washington Post · Ian Duncan
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