Page 70 • December 8, 2012 • www.constructionequipmentguide.com • CONSTRUCTION EQUIPMENT GUIDE
Shafer Contracting Awarded Project With $46M Bid INTERCHANGE from page 1
northwest to Fargo, N.D. Snelling Avenue is actually HWY-51 and serves as a city arterial street running from the south side of St. Paul through northern suburbs to its connection nearly 12 mi. (19 km) north at I-694. Shafer Contracting, a company specializing in road, sewer and grading work based in Shafer, Minn., came in with a low bid of $46 million to build the project. The company will eventually bring in more than a dozen sub-contractors to complete the project. Another, separate project from the interchange work is the reconstruction of a pair of bridges carrying TH-10 traffic over I-35W on the west end of the I-694 work. Lunda Construction, based out of Black River Falls, Wis., with a Minneosta office in Rosemount, is rebuilding these bridges at a bid amount of $8.6 million. Lunda is a Midwest bridge contractor MnDOT engineers had been planning to improve the long, out-dated geometrics of these highways for more than ten years. However, it was the deteriorating condition of nine bridges along the I-694/ TH-10 corridor that carried funding priority. As MnDOT set off to replace these bridges, they also began looking into funding to include the geometric improvements and, in the words of MnDOT Public Affairs Coordinator Kent Barnard, improvements that were equally critical as the bridge replacements. Chief among them was a short piece of four lanes of traffic shared by both highways that caused a less than ideal connection for the two roads. Along with the traffic chaos created by the shared pavement of I-694 and TH-10, there were “some non-standard left entrances and
corridor. This “combination of travel demand and geometric deficiency (traffic weaving) results in safety issues and travel delays on the corridor and has created one of the worst bottlenecks in the Twin Cities Metro area,” according to the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) Web site. Traffic statistics that support these improvements include an Average Daily Traffic (ADT) count of 110,000 vehicles per see INTERCHANGE page 80
Cat dozers and a roller move fill near mainline I-694 early in the second season of construction to improve a busy interchange north of St. Paul, Minn.
exits that we wanted to eliminate and we have had a higher than average crash problem along this particular corridor for some time,” said Barnard. The substandard geometrics that contribute to congestion and crashes include the lack of lane continuity for mainline I-694 eastbound and westbound through the TH10 commons area, the left side entrance of eastbound TH-10 to I-694, the left side entrance of northbound Snelling Avenue to westbound I-694 and the short distance of 1500 ft. (460 m) between the two intersecting highways, according to MnDOT reports. The reports state that because of these existing design deficiencies, traffic is forced to weave one lane which is a factor in the congestion and crash problems through this
With the limited right-of-way space, MnDOT added five retaining walls of more than 7,000 sq. ft. (651 sq m) to support areas that lost embankment.
An American crane works inside a wider section of the I-694 median to add lanes through this stretch of freeway.
The fine mist of a huge water spray keeps construction dust down at the site of the TH-10 bridge removal.