Page 56 • October 23, 2013 • www.constructionequipmentguide.com • CONSTRUCTION EQUIPMENT GUIDE
Reconstruction Prepares Longfellow for the Long Haul By Jay Adams CEG CORRESPONDENT
After years of planning, design, careful attention to detours and the daunting feat of procuring the proper federal and state funding, work has begun on the reconstruction of the Longfellow Bridge, the critical vehicular commuter link connecting Cambridge to Boston over the famous Charles River. According to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT), the $255 million Longfellow Bridge Rehabilitation Project will address the bridge’s current structural deficiencies, upgrade its structural capacity and bring it up to modern code, including improving multimodal access and bridge street connections to meet accessibility guidelines. A new American with Disabilities Act pedestrian bridge crossing adjacent to the heavily travelled Storrow Drive also will be constructed as part of this project. The Longfellow remained one of the five most important, so-called “mega projects” for their scope and cost, prioritized by Gov. Deval L. Patrick, since he first assumed office six years ago. It has received funding,
like the four other “megas,” through Patrick’s Accelerated Bridge Program, a multi-billion dollar earmark established to address and repair the dozens of decaying and aging commuter spans across the Commonwealth. The other four mega projects in the design phase are the Burns Bridge in Worcester, John Greenleaf Whittier Bridge (Interstate 95) in Amesbury and Newburyport, the Fore River Bridge in Quincy and Weymouth, and the Spaghetti Ramps (Route 79/Interstate195) in Fall River. Six Stages Over the Next Three Years More than 28,000 vehicles cross the Longfellow Bridge daily, as they have for many decades. Its stone piers and abutments have endured the effects of the moving water of the Charles River and must be heavily bolstered. In addition, there is the added critical dilemma of keeping the important MBTA Red Line subway train, which carries thousands of commuters to-and-from Cambridge and Boston, operating over the bridge daily during the three years of planned reconstruc-
tion. Advertised by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation as a designbuild project to save time and money, a construction team J.F. White Contracting Company in Stoughton/Framingham, Mass., Skanska USA Civil Northeast Inc. in East Elmhurst, N.Y., and Consigli Construction Co. in Milford/Boston, Mass., have formed a joint venture team referred to by MassDOT as White-Skanska-Consigli. According to MassDOT Press Secretary, Sara Lavoie, the team is concurrently starting basic construction elements and has completed the overall design. They are completing the inspection of the existing support structures with Phase one of the intricate six stages of reconstruction set for spring of 2014. The project is being completed in four construction phases, with six traffic stages. Lavoie directs curious traffic of a different kind, web traffic, to an eight-minute YouTube video animation, which dissects all six phases, showing how the task will be completed while subway trains weave around the work. The video is posted on the project Web
site at www.mass.gov/massdot/longfellowbridge. Phase one will reconstruct the upstream (Boston bound) roadway and sidewalk. Phase two will reconstruct the inbound to Boston MBTA Red Line tracks. Phase three will reconstruct the outbound to Cambridge tracks and Phase four will reconstruct the downstream (Cambridge bound) roadway and sidewalk. Outbound vehicular traffic to Cambridge is being detoured for the entire project duration. Traffic stage one is in place through September 2014 for reconstruction of the inbound to Boston road deck and sidewalk. During this stage one vehicle lane into Boston, a bicycle lane in each direction on the roadway and two-way pedestrian travel on the existing sidewalk are accommodated. Traffic stage two will be implemented to install the temporary shoo-fly track for the outbound Red Line train on the outbound road deck. During this stage, pedestrians will continue to use the existing downstream sidewalk. One lane for vehicle travel to Boston and two-way bicycle travel will be see LONGFELLOW page 60