A jury has ruled that Morrison Bridge owner Multnomah County is entitled to $4.4 million in damages for a botched project that replaced the span’s steel grating with a polymer deck that started deteriorating shortly after it was installed.

Jurors last week ruled that all parties involved in a lawsuit over the $4.2 million project, completed in 2012, are to blame for its failure. This includes the county, contractor, engineer and the manufacturer and distributor of the fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) decking panels that replaced the bridge’s original steel grating.

The Morrison Bridge’s deteriorating deck was installed between 2011 and 2012 by Ridgefield, Wash.-based Conway Construction Co. Problems surfaced within the first year following project completion, when the polymer panels appeared worn and began to loosen, according to county officials. More recently, cracks were discovered in the structure below the panels.

Conway in 2013 filed suit against the panels’ manufacturer and supplier – Durham, N.C.-based ZellComp Inc. and Bristol, Va.-based Strongwell Corp., respectively – blaming the companies for the failing panels. The county later joined the suit, claiming that the contractor was also responsible for the botched project, and filed another suit against New York-based Hardesty & Hanover, which designed the fiber-reinforced polymer system.

The two-week Multnomah County Circuit Court trial started last month and concluded Friday. Jurors said damages to Multnomah County totaled approximately $5.6 million, but they reduced the award by 22 percent – the amount that the county was found at fault.

Jurors ruled that FRP panel manufacturer Zellcomp was most negligent and should pay for 40 percent of the damages. Engineer Hardesty & Hanover’s responsibility is 21 percent and contractor Conway’s is 17 percent. Although the jury found that panel supplier Strongwell was negligent in one or more ways claimed by the county in the case, the company does not owe any damages, according to the decision.

Deborah Kafoury, chairwoman of the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners, said in a statement following the verdict that county officials plan to move forward with a project to replace the faulty Morrison Bridge lift span deck as soon as possible. Along with the award from the lawsuit, officials are pursuing state and federal funding for the project.

County officials would like to avoid using FRP again and hope to soon decide on an alternate decking material – lightweight and providing traction – to install on the lift span, county spokesman Mike Pullen has said.

Design of a second deck replacement project is scheduled to start this year. Construction could take place in 2016 or 2017.

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Multnomah County engineers are still debating the best fix for the deteriorating Morrison Bridge deck as a jury trial continues this week over a botched $4.2 million steel grating replacement project.

The span was closed to traffic Sunday for continued repairs to the fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) decking panels; they were found defective shortly after installation three years ago because of cracking and failure of the fastening system. The county is suing the contractor that installed the deck that replaced the bridge’s original steel grating as well as the panels’ manufacturer and supplier and the project engineer for the cost of repairs, valued at $2 million, according to court documents. The Multnomah County Circuit Court trial started last week and is scheduled to continue through Friday.

Applying temporary fixes to the Morrison Bridge deck can go on for only so long, especially after a recent discovery of cracks in the structure below the panels, county spokesman Mike Pullen said. County engineers hope to decide by this spring what material should replace the failing FRP panels and start design work on a second deck replacement project, potentially funded by an award from the lawsuit and state and federal sources, he said. Construction could start in 2016 or 2017.

“There’s an urgency here,” he said. “It’s definitely our highest priority bridge project.”

In the meantime, the county will continue to close the bridge periodically to make repairs.

“What we’re doing this year is really a Band-Aid to give us more time,” Pullen said.

County engineers need the extra time because determining what type of material should replace the lightweight polymer decking on the drawbridge is a bit of a puzzle, he said. Officials have considered steel grating, aluminum or again using FRP, but each option has drawbacks. Open steel grating, used originally, doesn’t provide good traction when wet and isn’t ideal for cars traveling at high speeds. Aluminum panels are less slippery, but considered more experimental. As for FRP, the county is suing the only company that uses the material for bridge deck panels.

More recently, county officials have investigated whether it would be possible to use a material that is heavier than the bridge’s original open-grating deck, such as steel grating half-filled with concrete to add traction, Pullen said. This would likely require strengthening the bridge and beefing up its 950-ton concrete counterweights to lift the heavier deck, he said.

“The old assumption was to keep the weight of the material at or close to the steel grating,” he said. “We’ve taken a new tack to see if we can use a tried-and-true deck method.”

The challenge is that the steel truss double leaf bascule bridge essentially acts like a giant seesaw and wouldn’t lift if too much weight was added, Pullen said. County engineers, together with consultant David Evans and Associates, are working to determine this max capacity.

“It’s an interesting engineering challenge,” he said. “The bridge is designed for one weight and (we’re) seeing how much can we add.”

The Morrison Bridge’s deteriorating deck was installed between 2011 and 2012 by Ridgefield, Wash.-based Conway Construction Co. Problems surfaced within the first year following project completion, when polymer panels appeared worn and began to loosen, Pullen said.

Conway in 2013 filed suit against the panels’ manufacturer – Durham, N.C.-based ZellComp Inc. – and supplier – Bristol, Va.-based Strongwell Corp., blaming the companies for the failing panels. The county later joined the suit, claiming that the contractor was also responsible for the botched project, and filed another suit against New York-based Hardesty & Hanover, which designed the fiber-reinforced polymer system.

Expert witnesses who testified last week during the ongoing trial included engineers hired by attorneys representing parties involved in the case to investigate what went wrong with the Morrison Bridge deck replacement project.

ZellComp witness Robert Lindyberg, vice president of Raleigh, N.C.-based engineering firm FDH, testified on Friday that his lab research involving a piece of the FRP deck panel taken from the Morrison Bridge showed that the panels the company manufactured were not defective.

“The only opinion I really reached was that as designed and manufactured the Zellcomp deck is structurally adequate,” he said.

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Multnomah County officials are holding off on major repairs to the Morrison Bridge until an investigation takes place to determine replacement materials for failing deck panels.

Construction to replace the bridge deck was initially scheduled to take place next year, but will have to wait until a decision has been made whether to use steel, aluminum or fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP), county spokesman Mike Pullen said.

The challenge is that each option has drawbacks, he said. Open steel grating doesn’t provide good traction when wet and isn’t ideal for cars traveling at high speeds. Aluminum panels are less slippery, but also considered more experimental.

As for fiber-reinforced polymer, the county is suing the only company that uses the material for bridge deck panels. This type of panel was installed on the Morrison Bridge nearly three years ago and later found defective because of cracking and failure of the fastening system.

The deck was installed between 2011 and 2012 by Ridgefield, Wash.-based Conway Construction, which later filed suit against the panels’ manufacturer – Durham, N.C.-based ZellComp Inc. – and supplier – Bristol, Va.-based Strongwell Corp. Earlier this year, the county joined the suit and filed another against New York-based Hardesty and Hanover LLP, which designed the fiber-reinforced polymer system. The lawsuits are scheduled to go to trial in February 2015, Pullen said.

In the meantime, the county will continue to close the bridge once a month to make repairs, but this can only go on for so long, he said.

“We do see signs of premature wear that tells us we’re going to have to replace the deck in the near future,” he said.

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In the wake of a delay last summer, the $4.2 million project to replace open steel grating on the Morrison Bridge is finally close to completion.

In fact, David Conway of , the project’s contractor, said it would be “done in the next two to three weeks if weather permits.”

Multnomah County spokesman Mike Pullen was a little less optimistic, but he acknowledged that construction is in its final stages.

“Weather is the biggest factor; some of the work can’t be done if it’s too cold,” Pullen said. “The safest prediction is we’re off the bridge by the end of March – only a week or so difference from David’s prediction.”

If the safety improvement project were to wrap up next month, it would be delivered nearly three months after the date targeted originally. Construction was delayed for two months beginning last July, when tarps being used by crews to contain debris blew off during a storm. The debris “allegedly” – as emphasized by David Conway – put the Willamette River’s water quality at risk.

At that point, county officials were unsure whether the bridge work would even be completed by May, in time for the Rose Festival, and rumors grew that city officials were going to terminate Conway’s contract midway through the project.

But Conway, which has handled numerous bridge projects in the past 30 years, presented a new and more “traditional” containment system – plywood deck areas – and the project got back on track.

“Everything is now going very well; Conway Construction and the county are getting along well,” Conway said.

Crews are now working on the bridge’s fourth quadrant. They completed the second and third quadrants twice as fast as the first, which required three months. When asked why the pace has increased so much since construction resumed in September, Conway said only that it was a result of “ingenuity and hard work.”

Pullen had a more expansive theory.

“There was a learning curve,” he said. “Each of the bridge’s four quadrants is very similar; once the first steps were learned and the containment system was put in place, they gained speed.”

Although construction is in its final stages, Pullen said a significant amount of work remains; some calls for installing some of the lightweight fiber-reinforced polymer panels that will give the bridge more traction.

Since opening in 1958, the Morrison Bridge has caused problems for drivers because of its slippery-when-wet steel lift section. In 2005, for example, a woman driving an SUV slid off the bridge and into the river; she barely survived the incident.

Pullen said that increasing driver safety has been well worth the setbacks the project has faced.

“The project definitely took longer to accomplish than planned, and it was definitely a challenge,” he said.  “But it’s a big safety improvement and the final product will allow drivers to drive more securely, which pretty much sums up how we view this project.”

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Work to replace the steel grating on the Morrison Bridge with lightweight fiber-reinforced polymer panels may finally resume after almost two months of being stalled.

“We don’t have a date yet, but we’ve told the contractor that they can move forward,” said county spokesman Mike Pullen.

Conway Construction was instructed to stop work on the bridge July 18, after the tarps that crews were using to prevent debris from falling in the river were blown off.  The contractor has presented a new containment system and the project has started to move forward again, Pullen said.

“Conway (initially) presented the tarp system as their preferred method. It met minimum requirements, and then it failed,” Pullen said. “They’ve agreed to install a more rigid system that we are more confident will not fail.”

The new, rigid containment system is more “typical” for such a project than what Conway had been using. It still needs to be approved by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and Oregon Department of Transportation. Once those agencies say that work on the bridge can resume, the new containment system will be installed by a subcontractor. Pullen said this should happen in the next two or three weeks.

The new project timeline will stretch into 2012, Pullen said. Initially, the project was slated for completion by Dec. 1, but now only half or less of the bridge is likely to be resurfaced by December. The work can’t be done when it’s too cold, so work will likely stop in December and January. The county hopes to have at least two lanes in each direction open, and both leaves of the drawbridge functioning, during those months. Currently, only one lane in each direction and one drawbridge leaf are functional.

The county and contractor will continue with their contract, and Pullen said that additional costs caused by the problems and delay will be distributed later. The county is placing blame for the problems on Conway, and Pullen expects a final settlement to be reached sometime next year. Still, Conway will complete the rest of the project with close supervision by the city, Pullen said.

“If we had not stayed with this contractor, we’d be facing a longer delay in getting work resumed,” Pullen said. “There’s a procurement process we’d need to go through – losing even more precious construction time.”

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Work is under way to make the Morrison Bridge safer by replacing 50-year-old steel grating with fiber-reinforced polymer panels. The aging grating is slippery, and has contributed to the bridge being the worst in Portland for fatal accidents, according to Multnomah County transportation spokesman Mike Pullen.

He noted that steel grating on the Broadway Bridge was replaced five years ago, and that the annual number of serious accidents on that span has since decreased. The $4.2 million Morrison Bridge project will include replacement of the original steel grating there when the span opened in 1958.

“Until recently, there was no material that was lightweight enough that we could cover the bridge and still allow us to open the bridge for a ship,” Pullen said.

The Broadway Bridge was closed completely for 60 days so that crews could work on the entire bridge at once. However, the Morrison Bridge project has required a balancing act, because a determination was made that the bridge should stay open at least partially for the duration of construction work.

“The Oregon Department of Transportation thought that closing the Morrison Bridge to all traffic would be too disruptive,” said Pullen, because of the bridge’s use as a freeway connection and as the primary route from Portland International Airport to downtown.

General contractor Conway Construction will complete the Morrison Bridge grating replacement in quadrants. Crews have pulled off steel grating on the south side of the bridge’s east leaf, and plan to begin laying down FRP panels for that quadrant next week.

In a way, the bridge is suited for deck replacement to take place in quadrants. The Morrison Bridge is 78 feet wide – too wide to be covered with one FRP panel, which was possible on the narrower Broadway Bridge. The new Morrison Bridge deck will have a seam where two FRP sheets meet in the middle.

“The good news is that the joint down the center is where the center of the bridge is, so traffic won’t be crossing it,” Pullen said. If motor vehicles were to frequently cross the joint, concerns may exist about increased wear on the materials.

Timing has been complicated further by a moving bridge: The Morrison Bridge is shorter than the Broadway Bridge, and water levels have been high this year, so one leaf of the bridge is being opened frequently to let boats through. By comparison, Pullen said the Broadway Bridge is opened only for large, oceangoing ships.

The completed Morrison Bridge deck will look similar to the one on the Broadway Bridge, but a different kind of FRP panel is being used. After the deck was installed on the Broadway Bridge, the county found that the holes drilled for installation of the FRP panel collected water, and crews had to drill additional holes to drain the water collected. The new FRP, called ZellComp, is slightly different and will not require crews to drill holes to anchor it.

“This is the second time we’re installing (FRP),” Pullen said. “We have more experience with the materials.”

Pullen said crews expect to finish the project by Thanksgiving. By that time, the county plans to replace all of the steel grating on the six-lane bridge with FRP.

That will include grating underneath the bridge’s south-side sidewalk. Crews will have to temporarily remove some of that sidewalk, which opened in spring 2010, so that FRP can be placed underneath. Pullen said the timing isn’t ideal, but it was out of officials’ hands.

“That added to the urgency, so we went ahead and built the sidewalk on the south. Ideally we would have done the grating first,” Pullen said.

The sidewalk replacement project was pushed to the top of the county’s priority list after the narrowness of the former Morrison Bridge sidewalk was identified as a factor in the accidental death of a pedestrian.

“We can’t always control the order of when we get money and when we get to use it,” he said.

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