Champlain Bridge demolition set for Wednesday

Transportation officials in New York and Vermont have announced that the Champlain Bridge, closed to all traffic since October 16, will be imploded on Wednesday, December 23, as long as conditions allow. The demolition is scheduled for 10 am. Public viewing areas will be set up. More information on the event will be released before Wednesday.
Dealing with the closed and irreparable Champlain Bridge has been something of a race to the crossing. The Ticonderoga ferry was shut down yesterday because of icy conditions and will run only as the weather allows. The Charlotte ferry will continue to operate.
Officials have promised to substitute ferry service between the Chimney Point area and the Crown Point area, and have made continual efforts to get a ferry operating, while coping with a chorus of complaints that things haven’t been moving fast enough. In fact, archeological work on land and testing for bedrock in the water were underway before the official announcement on November 9 that the National Landmark structure was unsafe even for boats to go underneath.
In that regard, New York State may have erred on the side of caution. On December 9, a windstorm that registered gusts of over 100 mph in Addison County upland town – in the lowlands, as measured at Middlebury College’s weather station, gusts went to 45 miles per hour – failed to decrease contractor costs by taking down the bridge.
John Zicconi, the director of planning, outreach, and community affairs for the Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans), said that Champlain Transportation, which runs ferries from Charlotte, Burlington and Grand Isle, will send down their largest ferry. That means it will take the 80,000-pound trucks and farm vehicles that formerly used the bridge.
Designing and building docks for vehicles of that size is not simple and won’t happen quickly, Zicconi said. Adding to the complications, the lake level in that area can change seven to eight feet every day, so the design will have to accommodate that factor as well.
“We’re going to do it in a manner that’s safe and doesn’t cut any corners,” Zicconi said. Building something that failed and had to be closed down would be very expensive and very time-consuming, he observed.
The ferry will be big enough to break ice, and will run during the time it is “closed” to do so if necessary, Zicconi said. Meanwhile, the Shoreham-to-Ticonderoga ferry will run through December, free of charge thanks to a state subsidy, as long as the lake doesn’t freeze.
As for the demolition, the two states announced on December 11 that Harrison & Burrowes Bridge Constructors, inc., which did a about a million dollars worth of work on the bridge over the summer, will be the general contractor for that job. They in turn have hired Idaho specialists Advanced Explosives Demolition, Inc. to plan and carry out the $188,000 job.
That does not include removal of the debris. Zicconi said that because there might be environmental concerns (area resident William Kuntz has argued that lead paint is almost certainly on the old bridge), all material will be taken from the lake, using barges and cranes and divers as necessary. The work will probably continue into next summer, he said.
Television images of city buildings imploding and turning into safely contained rubble may be influencing how the public and press are envisioning the demolition process. Zicconi said that even before hiring Advanced Explosives, the plan had been to remove the center, arched section first—preferable before ice sets in—then work on the parts closer to the two shores as the winter went on.
The concrete piers of the old bridge must be removed as well to put a new bridge at the same crossing, Zicconi said. He didn’t know the technical details of how that would be done. When New York State released the results of HNTB New York Engineering & Architecture’s comprehensive assessment of the bridge – the information that led to the decision not to repair it – the 32-page report called Fay, Spofford & Thorndike’s decision in 1928-1929 not to reinforce the concrete piers with steel “difficult to understand.”
The bridge’s pathbreaking “continuous trusses” design also had the flaw that even localized damage could impact the entire superstructure, HNTB said. When erosion of Pier 5 accelerated from five to 18 inches depth over last summer, and when it proved that the bridges expansion plates had rusted together, exactly such a problem was identified. The report compared the bridge’s susceptibility to failure with that of the Interstate 35 bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007. “Relative movement and/or localized settlement as a result of continued pier deterioration is sufficient to cause collapse,” they said.
Six potential designs for a new bridge were presented to the public at a Dec. 12 meeting, and were available for online voting through Dec. 14, at https://www.nysdot.gov/regional-offices/region1/projects/lake-champlain-....
There is a steel-girder design and one using Interstate-style concrete segments; both have relatively flat roadways. Two are cable-stayed bridges, using tall towers from which cables radiate downward to help hold up the roadway, that have a somewhat higher profile. Two are “network tied arch bridges,” which would use massive steel arches in a way stylistically similar to the existing bridge.
A meeting held by NYS-DOT on October 8 said a new bridge would take until 2013 to build. Later they backed off a year to 2012 because there would no longer be the need to examine rehabilitation as an option in the federally mandated Environmental Impact Statement process.
Zicconi said on December 15 that he isn’t subscribing to the 2012 date. He prefers “as soon as possible,” if only because of the “unsustainable” costs of maintaining commercial traffic through ferry service.
Source: Vermont Business Magazine. Ed Barna