New $1.3B Houston Ship Channel Bridge resumes work

After months of work and uncertainty, as the lanes leading to the first new bridge sat waiting, it was cause for Robert Trevino to crack a smile.

“This is a great day,” said Trevino, executive director of the Harris County Toll Road Authority.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN: $27B backlog in rural projects could pose risk to drivers, Texas economy, report finds

Nonetheless, the project will need a lot more pretty good days before drivers have a new bridge, and see the pieces of a $1.3 billion redo of the eastern tollway take shape.

For more than 20 months, the county’s biggest single road project was stuck in the mud, figuratively and literally. Work on the project, roughly two years into construction, stopped when officials second-guessed the design after the engineering company that designed it, FIGG Bridge Group, was investigated for its role in a deadly 2018 Florida pedestrian bridge collapse.

County officials, notably Precinct Two Commissioner Adrian Garcia, sought a review of the plans, which found “significant concerns” with the design. That led to lengthy discussions among engineers and the companies building the bridge – San Antonio’s Zachry Construction and national bridge firm Traylor Brothers – that Trevino said required months of redesign.

“We have bulked those up to make sure it is the safest design possible,” Trevino said. “I think it is the piece of the bridge you will appreciate the most. It is holding the entire structure.”

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Many drivers, meanwhile, said they will be appreciative when they see something coming out of the ground. For months, as officials rethought the design, the approaches both north and south of the bridge have sat ready, essentially ramps waiting for the span.

“I’ve wondered what is taking so gosh-darn long,” said Sam Tanner, 60, who uses the existing bridge three days a week to commute from his home in Humble to his job in Deer Creek.

PRICE BREAK: TxDOT pumps the brakes on toll rate hike on Grand Parkway and Texas 249. For now.

Combined with the pause to reconsider the design, the changes added two years to the project. Drivers will not cross the first of the two spans until mid-2025, when two northbound and southbound lanes will shift to the new structure. Crews then will demolish the existing bridge and build the second span. Finally, by 2028, the tollway will be four lanes in each direction with shoulders, something the current bridge has lacked, which sometimes could leading to a harrowing trip for motorists in heavy winds or rain high above the ship channel.

Tanner said he is eager to have the new bridge.

“I just wish, for me, it came a few years earlier,” he said. “I hope to be retired by then.”

Though the changes along the Sam Houston Tollway largely will go unnoticed by drivers for months, structurally they are significant, starting at the ground level. Sub-surface work, where crews dug holes in excess of 200 feet and then poured concrete columns to stabilize the span stayed unchanged from the original design.

That makes the ongoing concrete pour, and another scheduled to start soon on the southern support for the span, huge in terms of concrete and construction timing. Each pylon now is nearly three times as large as the footprint along the ship channel, with 2.8 times the concrete and 8.3-times the steel rebar of the initial design.

Creating that thicker, wider base, however, will be a long process. Prasad Jasti, project manager for the bridge, said each of the 514-foot towers is broken into 16 sections. The concrete pours for each section should take about 20 days, meaning about a years worth of work to get the towers topped before the cable-stay bridge can be built.

What those cables and towers hold up, however, is different than initially planned. As part of the redesign to eliminate safety concerns, Trevino said officials opted to ditch the concrete forms that FIGG designed to put the bridge together like a very large piece of IKEA furniture in favor of steel beams topped with concrete.

In design terms, Trevino said it is returning the bridge to the established way to build.

“There are a lot of nuances we have eliminated with the new design,” he said, noting it also should eliminate interference with ship channel traffic by using a barge to hoist some concrete segments into place. “We can work above them with a lot less disruption.”

The work does, however, come with a large cost. Commissioners Court in November approved spending nearly $300 million, including $50 million to demolish previously built work, simply to restart construction.

The good news, Trevino said, is that a year into the reclamation those estimates remain the same.

“We’re pouring and there is no impact to the previous schedule or previous cost,” he said.

BIG BET ON BUSES: Next step to better transit is predicting where people want to go

Nor have rising costs, notably for steel and concrete, changed the prices, Trevino said.

“We took into consideration there would be some escalation, and we are within that,” he said.

The Ship Channel span is one of two in Texas affected by design concerns related to FIGG. The Texas Department of Transportation halted work on the Harbor Bridge in Corpus Christi earlier this year, as the builder and TxDOT worked through suggested changes to FIGG’s design. Work was suspended in August after TxDOT determined the builder, Flatiron/Dragados, failed to address needed safety changes. In September, state officials said they were working to restart the project, which has also seen its completion date slide to 2025.