SHINE — Workers should have a large Hood Canal Bridge section removed shortly after barriers go up to close bridge at 12:01 am. Friday.
“We’re wasting no time,” said Becky Hixson, state Department of Transportation spokeswoman for the six-week bridge project.
“The first day, the draw span will come out.”
Tugboats will be poised near the structure to move in and tow out the 471-foot draw span after Kiewit General workers begin cutting apart the bridge to replace three-quarters of a mile of the entire east half.
The bridge work has been in the works since planning started in 1996. The cost of the total project — which includes retrofitting the western half by sometime in 2010 — has soared from an estimated $170 million in 1998 dollars to just short of $500 million today.
More than $86 million of that cost resulted from a more than three-year delay in the project after Native American remains and artifacts were uncovered in August 2003 at the former Tse-whit-zen village on Marine Drive in Port Angeles.
Contractors dug into the 2,700-year-old Klallam village while building a graving dock site to construct 14 new concrete pontoons for the east-half bridge replacement project. The graving yard work was halted in December 2004 after more than 300 graves were found.
The state abandoned the site for another pontoon construction site at Concrete Technology in Tacoma.
A settlement with the state in August 2006 gave the city of Port Angeles and the Port of Port Angeles each $7.5 million in grants from the state to offset lost economic activity.
The Lower Elwha received $2.5 million and 11 acres at the site. It plans to build a cultural center and museum on about 6 acres it will lease at low cost from the state.
The pontoons were assembled, outfitted, tested and completed in August 2008 in Seattle and are now moored in Port Gamble Bay, ready to be towed by tugs to the bridge site.
What will happen
Upon closure Friday, workers will begin saw-cutting joints from the top decks to the bottom pontoon, Hixson said.
Three saws will be set up on the pontoon deck and cut away about one-third of the pontoon.
The heavy-duty saw will use a diamond-embedded steel cable, which will be fed through vertical holes in the deck.
Divers will then bring the end of the cable back to the saw to form a complete loop.
Once a loop is formed, water will be pumped to the saw to keep the wire lubricated for cutting.
To separate the pontoons, 80 bolts measuring 1.5 inches in diameter must be removed, and 24 steel tendons must be cut.
High strength steel rods then will be installed to temporarily keep the pontoons together.
Four wedges will be put into place — one at each corner — to keep the pontoons slightly separated and allow cutting equipment to reach the tendons.
Hixson said cutting apart and pulling out the bridge pieces will be the easiest part of the job.
“The slow part is connecting up,” she said. “When you are disconnecting, you don’t have to be careful, you just cut it.”
Pulling in, lining up and fitting together the new bridge pontoons is a far more exact art, she said.
The roadways on each of the new pontoon sections must be accurately joined to within 1/8 inch, about the width of the two stacked pennies.
Deterioration
The original east-half pontoons, superstructure and draw span assembly bridge have seriously deteriorated under harsh marine conditions since the bridge opened Aug. 12, 1961.
Decades of wind, waves and saltwater have pummeled and worn the eastern half down and concrete underneath has broken off, exposing steel rebar to the elements.
When DOT officials came to Port Angeles in 2002 to discuss the bridge project and the possibility of building a graving yard there, they expressed a sense of urgency, fearing that what happened to the bridge’s western half in 1979 — a major storm sank it — could happen to the eastern half.
The new east-half pontoons are designed to last 75 years and provide a wider, safer roadway along with more reliable electrical, mechanical and hydraulic systems, state transportation officials said.
Some of the pontoon sections being removed and replaced are more than 300 yards long.
Once the draw span is removed, then comes the 2,928-foot flanking pontoon sections, including the so-called “bulge” in the bridge.
Then the 720-foot roadway pontoons come out, followed by the 770-foot roadway pontoons.
With state Highway 104 closed beyond South Point Road to the bridge’s west end, a portion of the highway will be excavated for new fish-passage culvert, parts of which are sitting ready at the intersection of the highway and South Point Road.
Training
Hixson said this week will be a time of final training for all involved in the closure.
Training will be conducted for emergency medical services, water shuttle ferry service across the canal provided by Port Angeles-based Victoria Express to the North Kitsap Peninsula and the State Patrol’s role in traffic control on U.S. Highway 101, state Highway 104 and South Point Road.
“We are to go though some scenarios, understanding what each other does,” she said.
Communication will be stressed among entities.
The water shuttle service by two 149-passenger boats will practice loading and unloading patients and those in wheelchairs, she said.
“On Thursday, we’ll be doing a Coast Guard inspection of ferry shuttles and finishing training,” she said.
Already up and running since last week around the Peninsula are electronic signs warning motorists of the bridge’s closure Friday.
The bridge’s overall length is 7,869 feet and the depth of water below the floating pontoons ranges from 80 to 340 feet. It handles between 15,000 and 20,000 vehicles a day.
Twenty 29-foot-tall concrete anchors were set during 2007 to hold the new bridge pontoons in place using steel cables securing the anchors to the pontoons.
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Port Townsend-Jefferson County Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
