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| Bridge building, or
how to manage a truly large project |
Jim Ruddell (BS 1977 CEE) is the construction
manager for the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Project, which will carry Interstate
95 and I-495 traffic across the Potomac River just south of Washington
DC. When both directions are open in 2008, it will provide more than double
the traffic capacity of the existing, 41-year-old bridge.
The massive, $2.4 billion project is currently the largest active public
works project in the nation. It is so large that it was the subject of
a recent Discovery Channel “Extreme Engineering” documentary.
With 30 contractor firms, 1,000 workers and the involvement of government
from the municipal to the federal levels, it is an extreme management
challenge as well. Still, it is on schedule and on budget. |
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Please describe
the project. What does it entail and why is it important? |
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The Woodrow Wilson Bridge Project
is on the I-95 corridor. More than 1 percent of the trucked gross domestic
product crosses the bridge each year. It carries 200,000 vehicles a day
and there is a real bottleneck each morning and evening because it is carrying
traffic it was not originally designed to carry. The transportation plan
for this region originally called for the interstate to go through the District
of Columbia. Based on local resistance the alignment was diverted to the
capitol beltway, I-495, that circumscribes Washington DC. So, the beltway
ended up carrying interstate traffic in addition to the beltway traffic.
The bridge opened in 1961 and reached capacity in about 9 years, which was
75,000 vehicles a day. The congestion across the bridge is an economic impact
to the area and certainly a bottleneck on the transportation corridor both
locally and for the eastern seaboard. |
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Talk about the bridge
as a physical object. Describe it structurally. |
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We call it a V pier design. Essentially
we are building upside down triangles on top of foundations to create the
substructure for the girders that carry the travelway [the road]. Although
this bridge type is pretty rare, there are some advantages to the V pier
design. Some of the technical benefits are that it imparts only vertical
loads to the foundations, whereas a conventional arch imparts lateral loads
in addition to vertical loads. So the foundation design was simplified by
not having to drive piles at an angle, which we call “battered piles.”
All the piles are driven plumb [vertically]. Because our piles are so big,
that was a big benefit.
The other benefit to that selection is that it reduces our span length because
the concrete Vs reach out and reduce the effective span length from one
V pier tip to the tip of the next V pier. So that enabled us to reduce the
number of foundations in the water without having to go to a very large
girder section. Our spans run about 300 feet long and our girder depths
run up to about 12 feet. If you measure pier to pier — from center
pier to center pier — we’d be pushing about 500 feet and our
girders would be so large they’d be unwieldy to handle and erect.
We can deliver our girders by truck which is a huge economic consideration
in determining who can competitively bid the job. |
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It is the biggest active transportation project
in the United States, right? How big a deal is this from an engineering
perspective? |
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This is a $2.439 billion project. It is the largest active transportation
public works project in the United States. The Boston Artery [the “Big
Dig”] of course is quite a bit larger but it is at a stage close to
completion where their remaining work is below what we have in this program.
The Oakland Bay Bridge will be larger, but not at present because people
are still talking about how to proceed.
The Woodrow Wilson Bridge includes the complete reconstruction of four highway
interchanges in addition to the 1.2 mile bridge over the Potomac River.
The new bridge is a 12-lane structure, six lanes in each direction, and
a 12-foot wide pedestrian way. The project is also designed to carry either
HOV or heavy rail across the drawspan, which poses some engineering challenges
for the rigidity of the structure and the ability of that drawspan to realign
consistently and safely carry transit. |
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This project has 1,000 workers and 30 contractors.
How do you manage that? |
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We put a tremendous amount of effort into building a plan that could be
successful. This is the first project in the U.S. that required a construction
management plan to meet FHWA megaproject guidelines. Our CM plan articulates
a culture of how we’re going to operate. It sets the stage for enabling
our contractors to be productive and profitable based on anticipating likely
needs such as access and coordination among other contractors. We included
a provision, for example, that allows contractors to negotiate milestone
dates with the “neighboring” contractors who are affected by
those dates. We created an integrated corridor schedule that identified
the key elements and “hold points” that would control the progress.
From that, we created access release dates, milestone dates, and incentives
and disincentives where one contractor would be obligated to deliver a specific
project element by a specific date and the neighboring contractor could
rely on that date as part of their bid and their schedule. |
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Has your undergraduate experience at Stanford
helped you on this project? |
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I loved being at Stanford. I think one of the things that came out of
it for a lot of folks was the exposure to a variety of perspectives and
the continual challenge to think critically. A lot of that came from outside
the classroom, from just the caliber of our peers — the diversity
of their experiences and the variety of their talents. It certainly has
broadened my mind from having grown up in rural North Carolina and having
one way of looking at the world. It really gave me a hunger to continue
to learn and to try to look at issues from a more global perspective and
to really value the contributions that people can make regardless of what
their point of reference is. |
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Did you ever imagine when you were a student
here that you’d end up managing the construction of a $2.4 billion
bridge? |
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No I certainly didn’t. During my senior year, I thought I might
go back to North Carolina and work for a utility company. But that changed
pretty radically. I got an offer to go to Saudi Arabia and took it right
out of college. That was in 1977. Really early out of college my plans were
off the map of what I had envisioned. It just continued from there. I ended
up working on the construction of the space shuttle launch pad at Vandenburg
Air Force Base, then a classified tunneling project in DC. I’ve worked
on a whole variety of really neat jobs before this one. The Woodrow Wilson
Bridge project is a once in a lifetime opportunity for a civil engineer.
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