Over troubled water

Published: May 1, 2009

By Maggie Peterman

Two paramount challenges confronted engineers and contractors building the Maple-Oregon Bridge over the downtown Sturgeon Bay shipping channel.

Challenge No. 1 was designing Wisconsin’s longest bascule lift bridge with mechanically driven center locks.

It had to be a lift bridge because U.S. Coast Guard requirements made building a fixed-span bridge difficult in this case, said Rich Jarmakowicz, senior project manager for Teng & Associates Inc., Chicago.

“It’s preferable to build taller, higher bridges that ships can pass under,” he said. “(A fixed-span bridge) would have had to be a lot longer, and they would have had to tear down buildings and acquired additional right-of-way.”

Once Teng & Associates finished designing the lift bridge, Dave Sweere, a project manager with Lunda Construction Co., Black River Falls, and his team had to build it.

Sweere’s team faced challenge No. 2: Convince the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to let laborers complete their work during a restricted period.

To meet a tight deadline, Lunda wanted crews to work from barges in the shipping channel between February and June. But the DNR restricts activity in the channel during part of that period because of spawning fish.

But after a few sleepless nights, Sweere said, he came up with a plan. He hired an underwater videographer in November 2006 to film while workers set sheet piling to frame cofferdams to build the bridge piers.

The video demonstrated that workers would create a minimal amount of stream disturbance during construction of the piers and convinced the DNR to endorse the building of the bridge without delay, Sweere said.

“We couldn’t wait five or six months for ice to thaw and fish to spawn,” said Sweere, a 30-year veteran bridge builder. “We struggled with how to do that. That’s when I hired a diver.”

Dale Weber, structure and maintenance engineer for WisDOT’s Northeast Region, said the Maple-Oregon Bridge’s 200-foot opening is the widest in the state.

“It was such a complicated bridge that things can happen (that) you can’t foresee in the design phase,” he said. “The designers have to be prepared to work with the bridge contractors. It was definitely a team effort.”