Highway 40 work drags on

By Ken Leiser

Jun. 8, 2008 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) --

ST. LOUIS -- When Missouri set out to strengthen the elevated section of Highway 40 downtown against earthquakes, officials said it would take a few years and cost a little more than $11 million.

But more than a decade after work began on the nearly 1.5-mile connector to the Poplar Street Bridge, it remains unfinished. Two short stretches are not done, leaving them unprotected against a major quake.

And the projected cost of the strengthening work has grown tenfold, to $110.4 million.

State transportation planners defend the approach they've taken on the state's most extensive seismic retrofit job. The elevated highway was identified as vulnerable the year after a similar span in Oakland, Calif., collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, killing 42.

Much of the work here, some of it in the shadow of the new Busch Stadium, has proceeded largely unnoticed -- beneath the elevated roadways and even below ground level -- and has not required lengthy shutdowns of the highway.

But the work has been extensive. Concrete columns have been wrapped with steel jackets, reinforced piles have been driven 80 feet into bedrock to strengthen footings and extra steel has been stitched into the support structures to more evenly distribute the force of an earthquake.

"It's one of the more difficult structures to work on in the state," said James Middleton, who manages the project for the Missouri Department of Transportation. He estimates that the span, designed to withstand a 1-in-500-year earthquake, is more than 70 percent retrofitted so far.

Missouri officials say there are several reasons for the delays and cost increases. Among them: -- Seismic strengthening shifted early on to a far more expansive -- and far more expensive -- reinforcement strategy than the one considered in early studies.

-- As costs went up, state officials decided to spread the spending over several years, slicing the work into smaller projects.

-- Because the state Transportation Department doesn't own all the land beneath the elevated highway, it had to secure access rights from several landowners. The approach proved extremely time-consuming, with one state official calling it "disastrous" to the project's progress.

Other, unforeseen problems also have hampered work, including underground utilities that did not show up on maps, soaring steel prices, and a concrete truck drivers strike in 2000 that stalled deliveries.

While California has more frequent quakes, Missouri and its neighboring states are preparing for seismic threats of their own.

St. Louis is about 150 miles north of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which crosses southeastern Missouri and Southern Illinois. It generated four quakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater in 1811 and 1812.

Much closer is the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone, which cuts across southeastern Illinois and southwestern Indiana. It spun off a magnitude 5.2 earthquake in April that was felt throughout the Midwest but caused no injuries and only minor property damage.

April's quake did knock some concrete off the aging South Kingshighway viaduct over the Union Pacific line at Shaw Boulevard, forcing city engineers to briefly shut it down for inspection.

Bridges built since 1993 have been designed to modern seismic standards. But transportation officials fear a large quake could badly damage older highway links, including the Poplar Street Bridge approach.

After the 1989 earthquake that damaged San Francisco Bay-area highways, Missouri and other states with seismic hazards took a closer look at highway bridges.

States since then have spent tens of millions of dollars beefing up vulnerable spans. Illinois has spent about $100 million in the past 18 years on seismic strengthening and other rehabilitation work on Metro East approach ramps to the Poplar Street Bridge, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation.

The Poplar Street Bridge itself has been retrofitted, in a joint project between Missouri and Illinois. Missouri has done other earthquake strengthening work, including one span of the Blanchette Memorial Bridge over the Missouri River, Interstate 270 over Interstate 44 and I-70 at the Earth City Expressway.

But by far the most extensive undertaking was the stretch of Highway 40 downtown. Traffic counts taken in 2006 show nearly 90,000 cars a day travel the elevated highway.

Running from 21st Street to the Mississippi River, the elevated stretch of highway opened in August 1971. The Post-Dispatch reported that the opening of the bridge "finally provides an uninterrupted, high-speed route through the heart of St. Louis."

It begins at the Poplar Street Bridge with eastbound and westbound lanes running side by side, then becomes a double-deck bridge between Broadway and 14th Street, before reverting to a side-by-side highway.

Missouri highway officials said at the time construction began that the double-deck design would save right-of-way costs in an area dominated by railroads and downtown buildings, and make it easier to connect the highway's ramps to the streets below.

In line with standards of the day, it was designed more to withstand its own weight and the traffic from above than the lateral forces of an earthquake.

Sverdrup Corp. of St. Louis, the firm that designed the elevated section of Highway 40 in the 1960s, evaluated the span in 1990 and again in 1994.

Its concluded in 1994 that "significant retrofit work" was needed to meet minimum standards and prevent the approach from collapsing in an earthquake. But the firm added that for "relatively little additional expense" the span could be strengthened so it could carry traffic after a quake.

The preliminary cost estimate in 1994 was $11.2 million.

But Sverdrup and state transportation officials later decided that fortifying the span would require much more extensive work than was originally thought.

Instead of wrapping steel around column weak spots and replacing a quarter of the more than 800 pedestals with devices -- called "isolation bearings" -- that would sort of act as shock absorbers, the whole bridge would have to be fortified from the footings to the road decks.

The structure's flowing design and ramps connecting it with multiple downtown streets made the extensive retrofit a complicated undertaking.

"The interstate changes," said John Finke, a structural engineer for Jacobs Civil Inc.

The support frames holding up the highway go from being simple to complex, he added, so they don't lend themselves to one-size-fits-all treatment, requiring more time and different approaches to the strengthening work.

Some of the biggest delays had nothing to do with design, engineering or material, but with simply getting to the work site.

The state owns some -- but not all -- of the land under the elevated highway.

Where it doesn't own the land, it has easements allowing it to enter private property to perform regular maintenance. But the retrofit work was anything but regular maintenance.

So MoDOT had to negotiate a series of agreements permitting its contractors to work on private property.

"We have tried to perform several seismic projects on this bridge by obtaining right of entries and agreements with the property owners, and this has been disastrous," Dave Nichols of MoDOT wrote in a March 2002 letter to the U.S. General Services Administration.

In the stretch of the project between 11th and 14th streets, for instance, the state didn't reserve enough work space in a parking area behind the Robert A. Young Federal Building. That contributed to delays.

"Part of why it took so long, why we ran into some issues was the agreement that we had worked out with (the federal government) was basically we were leasing a number of parking spaces at a time," Middleton said. "It didn't take very long to find out that that just wasn't a practical way of retrofitting the bridge."

Missouri decided to stop construction on that stretch of the bridge before the job was finished.

Nichols, of MoDOT, said in an interview that identifying property ownership was "difficult at best" on some stretches of the project.

And in one spot, the state had to coordinate its work with the owner of the former Union Station Cinemas -- whose lobby was built around a bridge column.

Nichols said MoDOT considered buying the remaining land it needed beneath the bridge, in part because the bridge would need a new deck at some point, and that would require access.

But that proved too expensive at $35.9 million, according to a 2002 cost estimate.

Instead, the state will try to acquire a series of temporary easements from property owners for the remaining seismic work, said Kim Reid, right of way manager for the Department of Transportation's St. Louis district.

As costs continued to escalate, Missouri transportation officials decided to extend the life of the project.

The biggest jump was reported in late 1999, when the state told the area's regional planning agency, the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council, that the cost had nearly doubled, to $65.3 million from $33.6 million.

Ed Hassinger, the Department of Transportation's district engineer in St. Louis, said the agency considered replacing the bridge -- even if that meant rebuilding it at ground-level -- but that would have been far costlier.

Highway officials decided to set aside $10 million a year, using a combination of federal and state money, until the project was complete, Hassinger said. It was broken into multiple contracts.

Tackling all the work at once would have been too disruptive to downtown St. Louis traffic and would have tied up a lot of the region's bridge rehabilitation money, he said.

"We have taken a methodical approach to continue to make progress on this," Hassinger said. "I think it is the responsible way to do it."

Bill McKenna, a former state senator from Jefferson County who until recently served on the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission, recalled how contractor bids were rejected on one part of the seismic strengthening as "excessive." But the cost estimates did not drop in the next round of bids.

"We came to the realization that it is what it is," McKenna recalled. "It is going to be expensive. Do you want to spend the money on what could be a disaster if you don't do it?"

There are three stretches of the highway that still need to be done. They include the area behind the federal building, and segments at 21st Street and between the relocated Eighth Street to 11th Street. The contract to finish the work is expected to be awarded in the summer or fall of next year.

From there, it is expected to take two more years and cost roughly $27 million to complete. The state has committed to spending that amount in its transportation spending plan to finish the project.

Hassinger said, "We are going to deliver it."

Newstex ID: KRTB-0187-25865745