Improving Interstate 10

From one end of Florida to the other, crews are working to improve Interstate 10.

By Debra Wood

The $245 million, fast-tracked rebuild of Hurricane Ivan-destroyed Escambia Bay Bridge in Pensacola has taken most of the headlines, but there’s plenty of other upgrade work taking place in Florida to improve traffic flow on Interstate 10, one of the country’s primary east-west routes.

At I-10’s eastern terminus in Jacksonville, Archer Western Contractors of Jacksonville is reconstructing the Interstate 95 interchange. In Leon County, C.W. Roberts Contracting of Hosford, Fla., Archer Western and Anderson Columbia Co. of Lake City, Fla., are busy on three separate contracts that will widen 10.5 mi of I-10.

And in Pensacola, in addition to the Escambia Bay Bridge project, where Tidewater Skanska of Virginia Beach, Va., and Flatiron Constructors of Longmont, Colo., are racing to final completion, Archer Western is also busy adding two lanes in each direction on I-10 and improving access to the I-110 interchange.

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I-10/I-95 Interchange

Archer Western has completed about half of its work on the six-year, $150 million I-10/I-95 interchange, which includes 17 new bridges and 25 lane mi. The project began in February 2005 and will run through fall 2010. It has 10 major phases, with multiple subphases to keep traffic moving at the same speed as before construction started.

“Maintenance of traffic is a big challenge on any project but especially one that has a major interchange for two of the main routes in and out of Jacksonville,” says Greg Dutton, FDOT senior engineer and project manager. “This is a collector-distributor system as well.”

Crews are building the new interchange within the existing right-of-way to preserve adjacent commercial and residential development, adds Greg Nettuno, senior project engineer with GAI Consultants of Pittsburgh, the project’s construction engineering and inspection firm. No pile driving takes place at night.

The site included the footprint of a former city incinerator plant, which had contaminated the ground with hazardous ash. Shaw Environmental & Infrastructure of Jacksonville handled the remediation each time crews discovered more of the residual material.

Within an infield area, surrounded on all three sides by interstate, Archer Western constructed a deep-pile foundation for a flyover bridge. The deepest excavations reached 35 ft., with piles descending another 35 to 60 ft.

Archer Western plans night closings of the existing I-95 to place steel I-beams for the first of several flyover bridges. Traffic will be diverted off the highway to surface streets.

“We have a seven-hour window each night to do what we can, open it back up again and go again the next night,” Hutchinson says.

The first of the closings are expected to begin in May and last for three weeks while crews place nine spans, averaging 270 ft. per span, 65 ft. above the highway for the northbound I-95 exit ramp to I-10 westbound. All together, three steel flyovers will be constructed over the existing interstate.

“It’s something we and the folks who travel on I-95 in the middle of the night will get used to over the next couple of years,” Nettuno says.

Leon County

In Leon County, home of the state capital, FDOT has three projects under way to widen I-10 and improve interchanges. Each of the three contractors is adding a third lane in each direction in the median of a 2.5- to 3.5-mi. segment, plus interchange improvements and some work on secondary roads.

“The area of the Panhandle in Florida is growing, and the capacity issues warrant the additional lanes,” says Eric Rosenstein, project manager for Greenhorne & O’Mara of Laurel, Md., CEI.

Roberts began work in January on the $42.7 million segment one, at the western end of the job. Archer Western started the $59.9 million, 2.5-mi middle section in October. Anderson is working on the third $69.5 million segment, which began construction in October. The projects are scheduled for completion in 2008. The three will each receive bonuses if they finish early.

Rosenstein said all three contractors are working at least six days a week, including nights, with Archer Western typically working the seventh day as well.

“It’s a pretty intensive schedule,” Rosenstein says. “We’re in a pretty environmentally sensitive area, particularly the middle job.”

The water from I-10 drains directly into Lake Jackson, explains Eric Houge, project engineer with Archer Western.

“The techniques that work best are gabion rock baskets and sediment basins to trap the water and treat it and effectively remove the sediment before discharging the stormwater,” he says.

In addition, some of the contractors are using polyacrylamide, a powder that chemically bonds the soil and water.

“It holds the soil together, so it doesn’t wash away and cause turbidity,” Rosenstein says. “Once the clay gets in the stormwater, it discolors it. The discoloration brings a lot of attention to siltation.”

Crews also spray the slopes and stockpiles with hydroseeding and install temporary sodding. And they are constructing permanent ponds along the route to collect and hold stormwater.

Escambia Bay Bridge

Tidewater/Flatiron completed the first of two twin spans of the $245 million design-build replacement Escambia Bay Bridge in December, restoring two lanes of traffic in each direction and earning a $10 million bonus. The westbound span should open late in 2007 and has no attached bonus.

Hurricane Ivan severely damaged the original bridge in 2004. Air trapped below the dual structures during the storm surge lifted more than 3,400 ft of decking into the water and misaligned another 66 individual deck spans. A joint venture team of Gilbert Southern Corp. of Atlanta and Massman Construction Co. of Kansas City, Mo., completed temporary repairs using prefabricated, modular-steel Acrow panels from FDOT inventory.

Tidewater/Flatiron is now removing those panels and returning them to FDOT as it demolishes the old bridge to make way for the new westbound span. Crews are taking other parts of the old bridge offshore to create an artificial reef.

The new 2.6-mi. bridges rise 25 ft above the waterline, nearly double the clearance of the old structures. The bridge will have 65 ft of vertical clearance at the navigational channel, spanned with post-tensioned haunch girders.

In March, crews were driving 36-in. square, voided-concrete piles, setting Florida bulb-T 78-in. beam girders, placing waterline footers and pouring deck. When soil conditions dictated deeper-than-expected piles, Skanska brought in a Raymond 60X hammer to drive the 1,000-lb-per-ft-piles up to 175 ft. The westbound bridge will contain 541 girders and 103 deck spans.

“One of the nice things about this bridge design is it is very repeatable,” says Brian Estock, senior project engineer with Parsons Brinckerhoff Construction Services of Tampa, the CEI. “The contractor has gotten a little more efficient in its operation and the knowledge curve is better.”

I-10/I-110 Interchange

Nearing the western reaches of the state, in Pensacola, Archer Western is widening I-10 to six lanes to improve access to the Interstate 110 interchange and enhance safety.

“It alleviates the merge [on I-10] and separates traffic,” says Bill Bredesen, project manager for Archer Western. “It will ease congestion and ease flow into downtown.”

The $76 million project includes removing a bridge at Burgess Road and constructing a new bridge at the wider Creighton Road. The work began in 2002 and should wrap up this summer. The I-10 westbound flyover still needs decking and a barrier wall.

“It’s like trying to put a big puzzle together because there are so many different phases in the maintenance of traffic,” says Dominic Richard, construction project manager for FDOT.

Archer Western also is widening I-110 into downtown Pensacola as part of a $58 million contract and building a new $25 million I-110 split-diamond interchange at Airport Boulevard and Brent Lane. Those jobs are scheduled for completion in 2008 and 2009, respectively.

To find enough workers, Archer Western hired locally, provided training and promoting eight to 10 people who started out as manual laborers to foreman or superintendent positions.

“The area is not a bastion of heavy civil work, so the experience of the workforce was pretty small,” Bredesen says. “We’ve been able to train our own. Guys who started with a shovel in their hand have blossomed.”

Useful Sources

I-10/ I- 95 Interchange
http://www.thebigi.info

I-10/I-110 Interchange
http://www.i10-i110.com