I heard the problem with those piers was that a worker buried a hawkeye flag under each of them causing them to tilt awkwardly!
I-35 / US 30 Flyover Progress
- Thread starter scottie33
- Start date
Mr Dockstader (District 1 boss) is a great guy! Family friend and HUGE Cyclone fan ('87 CON-E grad i believe) and I know he wanted this done by football season
Reading all of this makes me glad I haven't heard anything but good news with the new I-74 bridge construction. Or maybe we just don't have enough CF Structural Engineers in the QC to keep me informed.
At 2:19 in the video you will see the actual cause of the problem.
Funny that is when they are saying noticed a big problem and there it is plain as day on the back of the dude's hard hat. I think it is 2:19 left in the video it shows up it's like 2:24 or something like that.
Now the finger pointing begins between the surveyor and the construction company (assuming they sub'd out the survey work) as to who's fault it is...
non-engineer here..
is there another way to compensate for the extra 12 inches other than cutting them down? can they adjust the off/on ramps at all?
is there another way to compensate for the extra 12 inches other than cutting them down? can they adjust the off/on ramps at all?
I don't understand how they are leaving all the rebar. If the height is off by that much then either there is a lot of concrete above the rebar and that won't be there at the correct height or they will have rebar sticking out the top of the concrete.
Usually people buy a sports car or something when they're compensating.
Usually don't have to compensate for an extra 12" though.
Glad to see you've now added Construction Engineer to your expertise
Changing the ramp elevations/profile grades a few inches usually isn't a big deal, but they could've had maxed out slopes/ROW issues too.
From the video, it looks like all of the steel for the girders is sitting there, and those would've been very specialized pieces to roll. The DOT guy made it sound like they might've had other issues aside from just an elevation bust too. If I was the contractor, I would've tried like hell to re-engineer this before jack-hammering the piers; given that they might been redesigning the pier connections, profile grades, elevations, etc. IDOT may have just told them to pound sand and start over.
Insurance companies are going to be fighting over this for years, if not a decade.
With screw ups this big; you look for anyone to blame it on, and usually you can find a contradiction in the plans or human error in the staking. I'm put a lot of money on it that there will be lawsuits as a result of this.
Is Errors and Omissions Insurance not a thing? Similar to malpractice coverage? If the contractor messed up willfully, then I don't think that's insurable, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that.
At some point the contractor can just pack it up and walk away and leave the bonding company having to pay to finish the job (and the contractor will have a real hard time ever getting a bond again, but somewhere in the money flow, that becomes preferable (no idea if the project is near that point)).
I'm sure it will be, it's just odd that they are out there jack hammering to get them to grade. Probably happens a lot more than we know.
I remember jacking up the side of a parking garage and putting in Teflon shims
