The bridge went down on a Thursday night before Memorial Day weekend.
We had a truck carrying an oversized load. This load was supposed to be in
the left lane but for some reason it ended up in the right lane. The pilot
car didn't really tell the driver to stop and the truck kept going and the
corner of his load struck several critical supports on the bridge and
the bridge just collapsed.
I was really taken away by the wreckage that I saw. I mean I've
driven that bridge many times over the years and was just amazed to see
it in that kind of condition and it was just really kind of horrified and then
I saw the vehicles in the water and I was just so thankful nobody was hurt.
One of the things you know, you go all over the country especially back
east, there's a lot of interstate system. On the west coast here I-5 is
the only north south interstate that connects us between Canada and Mexico.
And I had calls actually from some Canadian companies wondering how
to get their trucks across so I got good information from DOT and
relayed that to these companies.
So where the bridge collapsed and the detour routes were was right in
the heart of our commercial part of Mt. Vernon, some of our large
retailers, a lot of shopping districts and so what was happening was
there was so much traffic there that our locals were staying away.
Those businesses had impacts of up to 100,000 dollars a day in sales.
We developed a route, kind of a locals route, that we put on our
website, we sent it out to all or our list serves, encouraging people to go
out. We resorted to the Mt. Vernon High School cheerleaders with some
signs on these busy intersections that just said, please be patient, please
don't block intersections.
We basically started to mobilize into
the office and our office kind of became one of the central locations
where we were determining next steps.
I looked up and Jeff Horton from FHWA was standing in the doorway
and Jeff, the first thing he said was - what can I do to help?
He was there working alongside us as an engineer trying to find
solutions and answers to different problems that we had as they came
up and also exploring different options at a very high level early on
to try find the right solution and the fastest way to get the thing fixed.
You're not used to seeing that type of relationship between a state and a
federal agency where everybody puts everything aside and says what can
we do to make it happen, so we really appreciated that.
Should they put in a temporary span to take care of the collapsed bridge
or should they wait and do a permanent span? Basically just go
through the options. And at the same time because we knew it was going
to be an emergency relief project, look at it from an eligibility point of
view, providing kind of guidance to WashDOT on whether things that
they were planning would be eligible or not.
The resources that he has available to him through FHWA, he was able to
through his contacts, find out the information faster than we ever
could have and also find out if they were viable or not viable.
Restoring traffic was so critical, that was the big issue and they really
wanted to do that as quickly as possible. And the use of the
temporary bridges allowed that.
Typically, temporary bridges, these bailey bridge type bridges are
smaller, you know, two lane road ways, shorter spans, that kind of
thing. We're dealing with 100 foot long spans, four lanes of traffic, so it
wasn't just any temporary bridge that could work. So we found a company
that worked. They pre-designed these spans, they're steel structures
and they come in parts and they put them together.
Once you're opening it to traffic, that collective sigh that goes through the
team it's like, oh, we got the temporary bridge in place. That's a
fantastic feeling to see those first couple of cars go over.
Oh my goodness, the temporary bridge helped so much. We still had
congestion coming through town but that really alleviated so much of the
gridlock that we were experiencing.
The first day after the bridge collapsed we had biologists go out
and do some rapid assessment of existing conditions out there so we
had a baseline. This is the Skagit River. It's the
largest river that drains to the Puget Sound.
It's home to all of the salmon species that are listed on the Endangered
Species Act in Puget Sound. It's a designated wild and scenic…
federally designated wild and scenic river. It's a navigable waterway.
It's a prized sports fishing river and there are three tribes with treaty
rights to the fish in the river, so it's a very sensitive environmental
resource. We went to all of our regulatory
partners and the tribes saying we've got a problem. We don't really
understand the full magnitude of the problem yet, but we're looking for
your help in coming up with solutions.
Fisheries experts that work with the natural resource departments of the
local tribes put forward those recommendations to minimize the
impacts to fish, which we were able to accommodate in the contract.
When we went back after the fact and looked at how this project was
implemented and what kind of impact there was, we found that
there was a very minor impact to the environment.
There was a lot of debate as to whether a steel girder type of bridge,
a concrete girder, a truss bridge. There was a lot of different things
discussed and each one had benefits, each one had drawbacks. Timing was
very important so that's why we elected to go with a design build
contract in order to be able to put it out there to industry and to the open
market and have the different contractors try to put together the
best proposal they could. The weekend we put together the
design build contract, that's usually a process that takes many months and
we did that in essentially 3 days. There was some very long nights and
some very worn out people. It was very impressive to watch WashDOT
in action. As far as the request for proposal,
federal highways we had the responsibility of approving that
before it went out on the street and so as they develop things, they are
passing sections to me and I was reviewing them.
Everybody had a lot of opinions on how to do it. And so trying to work
through that and making sure we weren't missing something was a bit
of a challenge. One of the things I've learned in this
process is you know, when an extraordinary circumstance happens,
you can't do business as usual. You have to really start to push the
envelope and your comfort zone and what I mean by that is as we were
putting this together, we needed to look at alternative materials, things
that could be procured faster. We also looked at the weights of putting
a structure back in here. This is a steel bridge and when you
look at concrete, we couldn't exceed the loads on these foundations
because we weren't going to rebuild the foundations for example.
So we looked at light-weight concrete, things that we wouldn't
normally do for a permanent structure.
A big factor in the whole thing was the speed, being able to do it quickly
and the proposal that ultimately won out was one that was able to do it in
a single night shift.
They, in a single shift, jacked up the
temporary bridges, cut them free, got them loose, jacked them up and
moved them onto this side of the bridge onto a temporary platform
that they had built and then the new bridge that was downstream and they
raised it up and brought it into the permanent location and set it back
down on its permanent bearings.
I think the probably number one
thing would be the communication that was established between
WashDOT and federal highways. The second thing was the ability to
streamline many of the processes that can sometimes seem like they
slow projects down. And probably the third one was WashDOT's
decision to pursue a design-build method of delivering a project and
utilizing the contractors' expertise and their creativeness was I think
really key in delivering the project in such a timely manner.
It started out as a real big crisis but we were able to all pull together, get
something that's never been done before in place and operational.
Things were put together so fast that,
these businesses survived because of that.
And as far as our DOT staff, we were so happy to be celebrating with
them because it was a huge success, really showed how government does
things well. And we can do things well for the public.