The Oregon Department of Transportation has selected a construction manager/general contractor to lead a controversial Portland freeway expansion effort. The agency announced Monday an intent to award a contract to Hamilton Sundt a Joint Venture, in association with Raimore Construction, for the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project.

The joint venture teams Springfield-based heavy civil specialists Hamilton Construction and Arizona-based Sundt Construction. Raimore Construction, a minority-owned firm certified by the state’s Certification Office for Business Inclusion and Diversity, is based in Portland.

Estimated to cost up to $795 million, the project will widen a 1.8-mile stretch of Interstate 5 between Interstate 405 to the north and the Morrison Bridge exit to the south. A request for proposals issued in April listed a guaranteed maximum price of between $575 million and $635 million for the CM/GC contract.

The project lost the support of key backers earlier this month when Albina Vision Trust announced it would no longer support the project due in part to a lack of freeway caps included in current plans. The interstate was built through historically Black neighborhoods in the 1960s, and Albina Vision Trust has advocated for the caps as a means to restore communities displaced by the freeway’s construction.

After Albina Vision Trust pulled its support for the project, public officials including Gov. Kate Brown, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and Commissioner Chloe Eudaly followed suit, saying they would not endorse the project without the backing of communities of color.

According to an ODOT press release, involving a CM/GC early in the design process will help meet the project’s emphasis on providing “restorative justice for communities harmed by previous government actions.”

The contractor will work with community members to help shape the project’s design, identify subcontracting and procurement opportunities for COBID-certified firms and build capacity for minority workers. According to the RFP, ODOT anticipates Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) participation goals of about 18 to 22 percent; the project also includes workforce goals of 25 percent minority male workers, 14 percent female workers, and 20 percent apprentice workers.

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The Hawthorne Bridge will be closed to motor vehicle traffic this weekend because of a concrete pour on an eastbound ramp.

The closure will begin at 10 p.m. Friday and end as late as 5 a.m. Monday. The bridge will remain open to bicyclists and pedestrians.

The contractor is Hamilton Construction, a subcontractor of Hoffman Construction on the larger Multnomah County Central Courthouse project. The $900,000 ramp work involves rebuilding the southern edge of a bridge ramp that carries eastbound traffic from Southwest Madison Street. Concrete will be poured for a deck section that is approximately 12 feet wide by 160 feet long.

Work on the ramp is scheduled to conclude in mid-May, according to Multnomah County. The county suggests drivers use Morrison Bridge an alternative route this weekend.

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The Burnside Bridge is gaining some much-needed upkeep, but even its overseer, Multnomah County, knows it’s only a stopgap.

The steel-and-concrete bridge, a vital connection between downtown Portland and the Central Eastside, is 93 years old. Crews are performing extensive concrete patches and repairs, removing rust and refinishing hundreds of structural steel beams. Also, sidewalks and ornamental guardrails are being refurbished.

“T��� Burnside Bridge maintenance project is really sort of a Band-Aid project to get another 10 to 15 years out of the bridge,” county public information officer Mike Pullen said. “Multnomah County is considering doing a much bigger project to make the bridge earthquake-ready, and that could even involve replacing the bridge, so the work we’re doing in this three-year project involves concrete repairs, some repainting and a little bit of minor electrical work.”

The project derived from the county’s 2015 Willamette River Bridges Capital Improvement Plan, which identified the Burnside Bridge’s structural and movable components needing major rehabilitation. The county put the bridge at the top of its list of priorities for near-term work, and bidding on the roughly $20 million project took place in early 2017. Springfield-based Hamilton Construction, the project’s general contractor, started work later that spring and is now expected to finish by the end of 2019.

Major issues that are being addressed include rusting steel truss members, cracked concrete, deck surface deterioration and outdated mechanical and electrical systems.

Crews began on the Willamette River’s west side, tackling concrete repairs and other work. West approach girders, bent caps and columns were all rehabilitated, along with steel support trusses.

Meanwhile, the west-side bascule pit and control tower were also renovated, and the span locks and motors also received attention. The west-side control tower, which normally houses the drawbridge operator, was emptied to perform a remodel and address water intrusion. Other issues were addressed in work done by subcontractor Pacificmark Construction.

On the top of the bridge, the deck and expansion joints were renovated, while sidewalks, guardrails and overhangs also were repaired as needed. Many of the issues being addressed were identified when the bridge was most recently resurfaced, Pullen said.

“When they did that 10 years ago, they didn’t do anything underneath the bridge, and that’s where a lot of the repairs have been,” he said. “It’s the concrete mostly; they had nets underneath the bridge to catch the little bits of concrete that were falling, especially around the Saturday Market. One theme of things like this is that it is really a Band-Aid. If I were to show you other things like the Hawthorne Bridge in the late ’90s, in restoring that bridge they repainted every single thing and did new decks. With this, we didn’t invest too much, and when this side opens in February (the public) will notice improvements, but they’ll also notice these patches.”

Masons with Pioneer Waterproofing apply exterior weather sealant to the concrete girders below the Burnside Bridge’s east end.

One new technology being used by subcontractor Pioneer Waterproofing to carry out concrete repairs involves injecting epoxy adhesive into holes in the concrete and then wrapping those areas with carbon fiber reinforced polymer. The polymer then dries along with the epoxy to create a stronger span than the original.

Other discoveries made during the project indicate that the bridge needs more attention.

“T���re were a few things that are bigger scale,” Pullen said. “T���y found a crack in the pier in the river that’s closest to the downtown side on the west side, so this summer we’ll be going in there and dewatering and basically bracing that crack with some steel that goes through the whole thing and tighten it up.”

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Workers have begun the final phase of an effort to improve the 92-year-old Burnside Bridge.

Crews from Hamilton Construction and its subcontractors are repairing the concrete underside of the bridge on the east side of the Willamette River, near Northeast Second Avenue. Work should wrap up in early 2019, Multnomah County spokesman Mike Pullen said.

The section of bridge being repaired sits directly above the popular Burnside Skatepark, which is now closed during work hours – from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. It will otherwise remain open for use.

The current work is part of the Burnside Bridge Maintenance Project, which is a piece of the county’s 2015 Willamette River Bridges Capital Improvement Plan.

The Burnside Bridge Maintenance Project is intended to make the bridge serviceable for another 15 to 20 years while a long-term solution is drawn up and carried out. Crews will repair cracked and crumbling concrete, renovate the drawbridge motor and controls, perform electrical upgrades, fix rusting steel framework, repair pavement and sidewalks and overhangs and railings, replace expansion joints, repair cracks in the piers, repair concrete columns and beams and girders, paint steel trusses, and repair internal steel towers connected to the piers.

Hamilton Construction is carrying out the work, which is valued at a total of $18 million to $22 million. As part of the current work, crews will remove and patch damaged concrete and install bands of fiber-reinforced polymer over the concrete to extend structural life.

Then, in late January or early February 2019, the south half of the bridge will reopen to traffic and the north half will close to accommodate repairs. The bridge will continue to provide use of one westbound lane, two eastbound lanes and multiuse paths.

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Multnomah County is approaching completion of a project to replace four 8-foot-diameter Rall wheels on the Broadway Bridge in downtown Portland.

To allow crews to carry out related work, the bridge will close to all traffic the nights of April 2 and 3, the county announced. The Rall wheels, which allow the drawbridge section of the Broadway Bridge to open and close, were replaced last year after more than 100 continuous years of service.

The bridge will close to all traffic on Monday, after the last streetcar crossing of the day takes place at 11 p.m., according to county spokesman Mike Pullen. It will reopen at 5 a.m. on Tuesday. During the closure, a survey of drawbridge parts will be carried out and a shim will be installed on one of the tracks supporting the Rall wheels. The survey cannot be carried out with traffic present because of the bridge vibration it causes.

Then the bridge will again close to all traffic on Tuesday at 11 p.m., but then reopen periodically following temporary closures of up to 20 minutes. It will reopen without more disruptions at 5 a.m. on Wednesday.

Pullen said TriMet will detour several bus routes that normally use the Broadway Bridge south to the Steel Bridge.

Rall wheel replacement work by Hamilton Construction began in July 2017 and will finish this spring. The wheels and double-leaf drawbridge mechanism are rare. Using four large steel wheels, large weights are rolled back from the center, allowing larger weights to lift the bridge’s two center spans. The old cast wheels weighed some 56,000 pounds each, while new solid steel wheels forged by Portland’s Peninsula Iron Works carry more heft at 88,000 pounds apiece. The mechanism allows ships of any height to pass through the bridge. Peninsula Iron Works is the only facility of its type on the West Coast, and its handiwork can be found in all five of Portland’s movable bridges.

Complicating the work, each Rall wheel supports the entire weight of the opening spans, some 2,250 tons each. Because of this, work on the wheels could take place only when the spans were closed. Replacing the wheels required about three months for each side.

More information about the project is available at .

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Two lanes of Portland’s Burnside Bridge will be closed beginning in early January 2018 for the rest of the year as part of the $19 million Burnside Bridge maintenance project.

Also, the bridge will close completely from 11 p.m. on Jan. 5 to 5 a.m. on Jan. 8 to allow Hamilton Construction to set up a work zone on the south side and traffic control on the north side, according to a news release from Multnomah County, which manages the bridge.

When the bridge reopens Jan. 8, one lane in each direction will be open. The speed limit will be reduced to 25 mph, down from 35 mph.

Bicyclists and pedestrians will share paths 7 to 8 feet wide. The south path will be separated from traffic by a barrier, while the north path will use the sidewalk.

The repairs may require full closure of the bridge on several nights in 2018, according to the county.

Hamilton will repair pavement, sidewalks and railings, paint areas below the deck and perform other work.

Separately, the county is working on a seismic resiliency plan for the Burnside Bridge to ensure it can withstand a major earthquake.

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In the early days of the 20th century, civil engineers were in an arms race to find the best ways to open a bridge.

One novel method was tried out by engineer Ralph Modjeski for Portland’s , completed in 1913. A Rall mechanism employs giant, 8-foot-diameter steel wheels that roll along tracks high above the center of the bridge.

To explain the mechanism’s complex movement to the uninitiated, it helps to have visual aids, said Jon Henrichsen, Multnomah County‘s division manager for bridges.

“It’s one weird, elliptical motion; it’s much easier to show with pictures, or, better yet, a video,” he said. “This is a very complicated bridge – way more complicated, really, than it needs to be. You can build a simpler bridge that’s easier to maintain and more reliable.”

Like an evolutionary dead end, the was en vogue for only about a decade before simpler, more efficient and economical systems took over. The Chicago-type bascule would become the standard of the style, an example being the Burnside Bridge. But in 2017, the Broadway Bridge and its unique design are still vital to Portland and the 32,000 people who cross the span daily. And now, after a century of rolling back and forth, its .

The four massive wheels have turned more conical than round, and cracks are showing up.

“T���re’s just a lot of issues with these,” Henrichsen said. “It’s time to replace them.”

The county has contracted with Springfield-based Hamilton Construction to replace the Broadway Bridge’s one-of-a-kind Rall wheels and the tracks and bearings, and rehabilitate the trunnion, control struts and associated structures. It’s a complex undertaking that requires a highly specialized skill set, and it presents its own engineering challenges – how to lift the bridge to swap out the wheels? How to make them?

To change the wheels, the Hamilton team is lifting the entire bridge, one 1,000-ton leaf at a time. Bridge engineer Ed Wortman likens the problem to jacking up a truck to change its tires, but in this case, no place on the bridge is hard enough to set the “jack.”

“It wasn’t designed to be lifted up into the air as we’re doing now,” Wortman said.

The solution created by OBEC Consulting Engineers of Eugene is a lift system that uses the stone and concrete piers under the bridge for bases, and thick steel plates welded to the bridge. Two 900-ton capacity jacks will work together to push thick posts upward.

This will all go on while bike and vehicle traffic and the Portland Streetcar are moving across the bridge.

“T���y’ll only lift it just enough to get those wheels out,” Wortman said. “T���n it’s just like changing the tire on a car.”

Wortman was a bridge engineer for Multnomah County starting in the 1990s, but he began working on bridges in 1960. He’s worked part-time since his retirement in 2007, and was on site this month checking progress on the project.

“We always thought we were going to have to change these wheels, and we thought the designer probably made some accommodation for it,” he said. “T���n we started looking at it, and it turned out, it wasn’t that easy.”

Ultimately, Wortman said, the decision to use the design was a financial one – it was slightly cheaper than the other two alternatives. Despite any trouble, it actually has done its job – creating the widest possible opening for ships – quite well, he said.

“It was a complicated system, but clever – but also, hard to maintain,” he said. “It’s pretty special. There’s not another bridge like it in the world.”

Each wheel supports about two million pounds of weight. But those wheels have been rolling back and forth for more than a century. The wheels are solid hunks of steel that start out about 30 to 40 percent larger before being pounded into shape. In 2017, not much metal is forged west of the Mississippi River, but VEGA contracted with Peninsula Iron Works to make the forgings.

The 88,000-pound wheels were forged – not cast, as were the originals – at Peninsula Iron Works. The original wheels had cored holes in them like spokes in a bicycle wheel, which helped make them considerably lighter. They were pounded out on the shop’s vertical boring mill, which was manufactured in 1968 but features modern automated CNC controls. They were flipped three times, and shipped on trucks with special permits.

“This is probably more accurate than they were done historically,” said James Johnson, president of Peninsula Iron Works. “Your big advantage today would be in how the materials were manufactured, compared to a casting.”

Johnson and his brother are the third generation to operate Peninsula. The fabrication shop performs 3,000 jobs per year. For this one, they were subcontracted under Vigor, which prepared plans and shipped the materials for the forgings. At more than 100 years old and the only shop like it on the West Coast, Peninsula aided the Allied war effort in World War I and mills serving the Pacific Northwest lumber industry. Its handiwork can be found nearly everywhere in the Portland area – including on all five movable bridges.

Once the new wheels are on, much testing will be needed to ensure they’re aligned with each other and the tracks are oriented perfectly. Among the updates incorporated into the project is breaking up the big metal struts that connect to the control room and pull the bridge open. Breaking them into three pieces, instead of one, makes for easier adjustments.

There will be one, final 48-hour closure over a weekend when final testing will be conducted. Once the old wheels are off, they will likely be shipped to a recycler, though the county has been in talks with the Regional Arts and Culture Council about using one in a public art installation, Henrichsen said.

In Modjeski’s day, bridges had much shorter life spans – maybe 20 years for the Broadway, Henrichsen said. The original operators of the bridge didn’t even grease its gears.

“He’d probably think we were crazy to still be operating this bridge,” Henrichsen said of Modjeski.

But a complete bridge replacement project would cost between $300 million and $400 million, and significantly impact commuters.

“After all these years, it still works well,” Wortman said. “So you can’t question the decision to build it in the first place.”

Broadway Bridge Rall wheel replacement

General contractor: Hamilton Construction

Cost: $13.5 million

Construction start: July

Expected completion: December

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The Colorado Dam Safe Passage project was a unique approach to improve a section of the Deschutes River in Bend.

The $10 million project started at a low-water period with deconstruction of a deficient pedestrian bridge and an existing small dam to allow inner-tubers and kayakers safe access through the Colorado Avenue Corridor of the river.

The rehabilitation project established three channels. The first channel features a set of mildly stepped riffles to allow recreational for tubers with twelve minor drops in elevation, guiding them towards the Drake Park take-out area downstream.  The middle channel consists of four waves that are adjustable by a series of inflatable bladders to provide a range of difficulty – from beginner to expert — for paddleboarders, kayakers, boogie boarders and surf boarders.  A third habitat channel includes multiple water cascades, shallow bedding areas and backwater areas for fish, aquatic plants and other aquatic animals.

Each of the three channels presented unique hydraulic design challenges. The “floater” channel had to meet hydraulic design regulations for the passage of red trout while providing downstream passage for casual floaters. The whitewater channel required four wave locations with conditions that dissipated flowing water energy to create waves that would function at various heights.  The bladder system allowed control through simple adjustments of inflatable bladders to compensate for water flow and allow various wave heights. A rock island separates the habitat channel from the other channels, a design feature that keeps people out of the sensitive area while also proving an aesthetic focal point.

Project Team + Stats

Project location: Bend, Oregon

Project cost: $8.3 million

Start date: April 2014

Completion date: September 2015

Owner: Bend Parks and Recreation

Engineer: Otak

General contractor: Hamilton Construction

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With an eye toward improving the construction industry’s dismal retention rates among female and minority apprentices, Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries has given nonprofit Oregon Tradeswomen Inc. grant money to promote harassment-free workplaces.

The two-year, $200,000 grant will fund efforts to raise awareness of “expectations of respectful workplaces through improved communication and behavior change,” according to a news release. Trainings will also cover “bystander interventions (and) other avenues for addressing disrespectful or discriminatory treatment on the job.”

The money is from the Federal Highway Administration, through the Oregon Department of Transportation‘s Workforce Development initiative.

The pilot project will focus on Newberg-Dundee Bypass construction. The infrastructure enhancement project is intended to reduce traffic congestion along the Oregon Route 99W corridor in the Yamhill Valley. Both prime contractor Hamilton Construction and Portland State University will donate staff time to support the effort.

According to a study by PSU, women and people of color were less likely to complete highway construction apprenticeships, with completion rates of 32 percent by male minorities, 26 percent by white women and 19 percent by female minorities, compared to 41 percent for white men.

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An Oregon construction executive has been named chairman of the board of directors of transportation research group TRIP.

Scott Williams of Hamilton Construction has served on the D.C. nonprofit’s board since 2003. TRIP (The Road Information Program) provides its reports and data to government agencies in support of infrastructure funding. Coburg-based Hamilton focuses on heavy road and bridge work and last year had gross billings of $150 million, according to a news release.

The year ahead will involve more highway construction, Williams said. After years of stalls and short-term fixes, Congress in December passed a funding package guaranteeing $305 billion for transportation projects over five years, which works out to an estimated 15 to 18 percent increase.

Effects of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act will lag a few months, Williams said, because it doesn’t make sense for an agency to have plans drawn up without funding available.

“FAST is great, but it isn’t the long-term solution to highway funding because it’s all based on gas tax,” he said.

As motor vehicles become more fuel-efficient and drivers spend less time on the road, government’s traditional method for funding infrastructure – the gas tax – has netted less and less money each year. Oregon last year began a long-anticipated to charge people based on miles driven. A limited number of drivers are taking part in the program. Williams said states and cities are increasingly looking to develop their own programs.

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