SHINE — News that scheduled daytime closures for work on the Hood Canal Bridge’s west half will extend into late January came as an unwanted surprise to Bart Lutton, who manages five Western Washington Peninsula Truck Lines freight-hauling terminals, including one in Port Angeles.
“It affects the service to the north end of the [Olympic] Peninsula quite a bit,” said Lutton, whose company runs up to seven deliveries a day to and from Bremerton and Port Angeles.
“A lot of our customers require quick delivery,” he said, and when the bridge is closed and the delay is long enough “we have to go around.”
Closures can be long
Closures for ballast testing on the west half of the bridge — which connects the North Olympic Peninsula and the Kitsap Peninsula on state Highway 104 — can last up to 1 ½ hours.
“If it’s a short-term closure — 20 minutes or 45 minutes — that just costs us in wages,” Lutton said.
“The customers will be affected by the services delays, and we’ll be affected by the cost delays as far as paying hourly pay.”
The bridge — at 7,869-feet-long, the longest floating bridge over salt water and the third longest floating bridge in the world — was closed to traffic for several weeks during a nearly $5 million replacement of its east half.
It was reopened in early June.
At that time, Transportation officials said that retrofitting work on the west half of the bridge — to match working components on the east half — would last through December.
Last week, Transportation announced that west-half retrofit and ballasting work face more hurdles before it is completed.
Transportation and bridge contractor Kiewit-General of Poulsbo are now scheduled to complete daytime ballast tests by mid-January.
“Crews continue to add and remove pontoon ballast weight, changing the way the west-half drawspan floats so it matches up with other pontoons and mechanisms on the bridge,” Project Engineer Jeff Cook said.
“To ensure accuracy this work must occur during slack tide — which translates into daytime bridge closures for motorists most weekdays,” Cook said.
Transportation also plans to continue intermittent 90-minute closures from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. Monday through Friday come early January.
Bridge closures will allow the contractor to complete functional testing, which includes approving items on a 90-plus page, 1,400-item operational checklist.
Tests in late January
Overnight work and functional testing sets the stage for 20 cycle tests of the west drawspan in late January.
The 20 test openings and closings of the west drawspan must be error-free. Even if 19 tests are perfect, if the last one fails, then the contractor must start over, Transportation said.
If everything goes as planned, the tests will take about eight to 10 hours, as they did on the east half.
Once they are finished, Kiewit-General’s work on the bridge is complete.
Joe Irwin, Transportation’s Hood Canal Bridge project spokesman, said that, since June, the agency has completed anchor cable connections and road grinding work as well as made progress on upgrading west-half electrical, mechanical and hydraulic systems to match the new east half.
The work included replacing the guide rollers, which help direct the drawspan pontoon as it retracts and extends.
The work that remains to be completed on the bridge includes ballasting the west-half drawspan so that it operates correctly and matches up with the east-half drawspan and mechanical systems that move the pontoon in and out.
Taking longer than expected
“This work is proving more time-consuming than we had scheduled, because we’re trying to ballast a 496-foot-long, 60-foot-wide, 21-foot-tall pontoon that weighs more than 28 million pounds [or 14,270 tons] so that it is precisely positioned within fractions of inch,” Irwin said.
“We still have function testing, during which we go through a punch list of about 1,400 individual items, to make certain every portion of every system functions properly.”
From October through December, traffic closures on the Jefferson and Kitsap Count side of the bridge on state Highway 104 have ranged from 10 minutes to about 110 minutes, Irwin said.
Such closures can cause traffic backups for a mile or more, depending on the length of the closures.
Test openings now are between 25 minuets and 40 minutes, with unscheduled marine openings taking between 45 minutes and one hour.
Nighttime test openings are running from 30 minutes to 1 ½ hours.
More drawspan openings
This month through Dec. 16, there were 34 bridge openings –17 for ships and boats and 17 scheduled tests, of which 11 were at night.
That compares to 25 total openings in December 2008, of which only one was for a work test.
November saw 57 total openings — 14 for military vessels, 14 for private vessels and 29 contract tests, six of which were at night.
That compares to 25 total openings in November 2008 — 16 military and nine private vessels.
October openings totaled 76, with 13 military vessels, 19 private vessels and 44 scheduled tests, 36 of which were at night.
In October 2008, there were 30 total openings — 14 military, 13 private, one contract test, two for maintenance.
Daily daytime testing allows engineers to review the status of the ballasting work “as we work to get within required project tolerances for the guide rollers and machinery, Irwin said.
“It also helps us properly match up the east and west drawspans when both pontoons are fully extended.”
The ballasting is tied to the completion of the mechanical retrofit work on the west half, he said, which began earlier this year and is now wrapping up.
Every move of ballast weight requires it to be redistributed to the different cells. Measurements are taken at slack tide.
“Once material is moved, we must then wait to see the progress at the next slack tide or two,” Irwin said. “It is an incremental process and is taking time.”
What’s a ballast test?
Explaining ballast tests, Irwin said the bridge’s roadway is comprised of huge — 14,270-ton — hollowed-out concrete pontoons that float.
Each pontoon has about 40 individual cells – “kind of like an enormous covered ice tray.”
To make sure the pontoons float correctly in relation to each other, he said, material is added to or removed from these cells. The material now is rock and seawater. Eventually it will be rock.
The materials lowers or raises the corners, sides or ends.
The “ice trays” that workers are ballasting — the west half drawspan pontoons — also float at a slight angle, and must not only match up perfectly with the east half drawspan pontoons, but also with the mechanical and guiding systems that extend and retract the pontoons, Irwin said.
“The size and weight of the pontoons make it very, very difficult to reach the ballast levels needed to ensure the system will function optimally for years to come,” Irwin said.
Less clearance for boats
Irwin said the bridge was built to specifications with the new clearances for marine vessels under the trusses at 50.7 feet high water level on the east side and 31.4 feet mean high water level on the west side.
The old trusses were at a height of 55 feet on the east, and 35 feet on the west at mean high water.
“Some of this reduction is due to pontoons sitting lower in the water from a wider superstructure . . . and some is due to deeper floor beams on the truss,” Irwin said.
“Going from a 30-foot-wide roadway to a 60-foot-wide roadway requires deeper beams.”
He said that the number of openings for private boat vessels, which typically are commercial vessels, has increased slightly since the bridge reopened this summer.
“We don’t track the size of marine vessels that pass through the channel,” Irwin said, adding that he doesn’t know how many of the openings are for sailboats.
Neighbors hear sounds
The new bridge makes sounds that have prompted complaints from some Kitsap County residents who live on Hood Canal.
When vehicles drive over the bridge’s grated decks, a slight “zipping” sound has been reported, Irwin said.
A “thudding” sound has also been reported. That is created when vehicles strike a metal plate at the bridge’s center span, he added.
Ballasting and final adjustments to the bridge might reduce or eliminate the thudding sound, he said.
No complaints have been reported from Jefferson County residents, who live farther away from the bridge.
“It’s easy to overlook what an impressive structure this is when openings are causing traffic delays, but the Hood Canal Bridge is definitely world-class,” Irwin said.
Work being done is taking more time because “we aim to deliver a world-class bridge that the citizens of Washington can fully rely on,” he said.
For more information about the bridge, see www.wsdot.wa.gov.
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Port Townsend-Jefferson County Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.