Bridge gets exit strategy
The piece of the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge that has been stranded at the Washington/Idaho border for two weeks could start moving again as early as Monday. But when it does, it’s going to be a long, slow trip.
The Texas hauler who brought the 100-ton expansion joint from the Minnesota factory where it was manufactured has given up trying to satisfy Washington state’s weight requirements with an extra-long truck that fit into a single lane of traffic.
Instead, the big joint – plus another one just like it that is parked in Sioux Falls, S.D. – will have to be transferred onto double-wide rigs that will take up two lanes and travel at 15-20 mph all the way across the state on Interstate 90, over Snoqualmie Pass, then Interstate 5 and Highway 16, a trip likely to take four days.
The hassles involved – traffic tie-ups, police escorts and delays – are not ones the hauler is looking forward to, but they fit what is beginning to be a pattern.
“This whole project has been a nightmare for us,” said Mike Love, the owner of Big Boat Movers of Zavalla, Texas. “It has essentially bankrupted this company.”
Love’s problems with the two bridge pieces began in Minnesota, when he had to hustle them across the border to avoid that state’s “frost thaw” deadline, the day each year when the ice melts and the weight restrictions get more stringent. Big Boat beat the deadline by two days with the first joint, which they parked in South Dakota, Love said, and they moved the second one out on the last possible day. Because the joints are designed to be flexible, they presented special packing problems.
“Imagine a 70-foot-long piece of wet spaghetti,” said the hauling broker who put Big Boat in touch with the manufacturer, the D.S. Brown Company. The joints had to be supported by a heavy rigid beam, which put the center of gravity so high it threatened to tip the truck over. On Thursday, it was not at all clear that Big Boat Movers was going to be the company making the final 300-mile leg of the trip. Given enough time, Love said he could assemble the necessary equipment to make the final push. And he plans to give it his best shot.
But time is of the essence on the narrows bridge project, which connects Tacoma to the Olympic Peninsula, and is running four months behind schedule.
Meanwhile, Omega-Morgan Rigging & Industrial Contracting, a Tacoma company that specializes in moving industrial equipment, said it could have the joint on the road by Monday and in place at the Gig Harbor anchorage by Friday. Marnie Nott, Omega’s administrative manager, said her company already has the necessary hauling equipment in Eastern Washington and is ready and willing to take over from Big Boat. Omega already has made a fallback deal with D.S. Brown, she said, and her company has submitted a permit application that the Transportation Department has verbally approved.
“We’re here if they need us,” Nott said.
Whoever drives the replacement rig, it is likely to be more than 100,000 pounds heavier than the one the joint is now sitting on, but total weight has never been the problem. “The key is weight distribution,” Nott said. “This will spread the weight out on all axles evenly.”
Meanwhile, Love, who also happens to be an attorney, is in a war of words with the Washington State Department of Transportation, which refused to let his load farther across the border than the Liberty Lake weigh station. Love and others in the heavy-haul industry say Washington’s method of weighing the rig – with portable “jump scales” that weigh one wheel at a time, was inaccurate. Love is convinced the complex formula Washington uses to apply its restrictions is unreasonable and possibly illegal.
Doug MacDonald, the Secretary of Transportation, does not appreciate the criticism. In an op-ed piece in The News Tribune Wednesday, he stated flatly that Big Boat movers had “made a mess of it” by arriving at the border with a rig that did not match the specifications in its permit.
The department is in an awkward position, because it is the agency overseeing the narrows bridge project and is as eager as anybody else to see that it arrives as quickly as possible.
“A lot of people at DOT are working very hard to find a solution to this, and we’re getting heat for being an overly stringent bureaucracy,” said Claudia Cornish, a department spokeswoman.
“But what would people say if we allowed this through, and it ended up damaging one of our bridges? We want it to get here, but we want to get it legally, and that’s what we’re going to hold the truck to.”