In Medford this week, crews broke ground on one of the largest health care projects in Oregon. Portland-based Andersen Construction began excavation and foundation work for a six-story, 323,600-square-foot expansion of Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center.

The new, $420 million patient pavilion will provide critical care, cardiac care and advanced surgical space, as well as two stories of women’s and children’s health care space – including a state-of-the-art neonatal intensive care unit. After the addition is completed (spring 2023 is the target date), 79,000 square feet of the existing hospital will receive renovations.

“Most of the capital improvement and master facility plan is focused on increasing our capacity for our highest level acute patients,” said Mick Zdeblick, CEO of Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center – one of three critical care facilities in the Rogue Valley operated by Asante.

International firm HDR designed the patient pavilion. Jacobs Engineering is serving as a project management consultant.

“It’s a broader team approach,” Zdeblick said.

Andersen Construction will work with Ashland-based Adroit Construction, which will tackle the renovations in the existing building.

“Andersen has been great to work with because we wanted to encourage our local subcontractors and contractors to be employed on this project,” Zdeblick said. “And Adroit is a local company that knows our campus really well.”

The patient pavilion building will be fairly standard when it comes to construction typology, said Jerrod Kowalewski, a project executive with Andersen Construction.

“It’s pretty cut and dried,” he said. “They set it up well for an addition when they built the last tower expansion. I’d say, really, it’s like any hospital work. It’s the tie-ins and the making sure we’re not disrupting the daily operations.”

There are several logistical challenges, however, including an expedited design process, Kowalewski said. Plus, finding enough qualified subcontractors to work on a project of this size in Southern Oregon has proved difficult.

“We got brought on right when they were on concept last fall,” he said. “HDR is designing a (large) expansion in 12 months. We’re all working remotely with the user groups, so it will pose a challenge because they’re designing at the same time they’re designing the renovation phase for after this.”

Andersen Construction also is benefiting from its good relationship with Pacific Electric Group, according to Kowalewski. The union-affiliated subcontractor from Medford is teaming up with Oregon Electric Group on one of the project’s critical components – a series of prefabricated ceiling systems that will equip 20 new operating rooms.

“OEG has a lot of (preconstruction) prowess and prefab experience,” he said. “And the idea is to have common racks for MEPS and trying to get everyone dialed in and building in their shops up here. We’re trying to minimize on-site labor as much as possible by doing as much prefabrication as we can.”

The ceiling systems come with LED lighting, all required ductwork and all the boom supports for the operating booms.

Normally, the systems required in operating rooms create a substantial amount of congestion in the ceilings, said Ben Gengler, a senior project manager with Andersen Construction. This approach, known as a single large diffuser, integrates framing of the booms into the body of the diffuser, allowing installation in one piece.

“It minimizes overhead structure,” Gengler said. “And with 20 new ORs, taking that approach is saving us weeks of work. It’s not necessarily a cheaper approach from a construction standpoint, but from time savings and efficiency, it’s a very big savings for us.”

Wilsonville-based subcontractor Western Partitions Inc., renowned for its prefabricated wall systems, is scheduled to work on the project, Kowalewski added.

“We’re also looking a lot at the façade elements and seeing what we can do there” with prefabrication, he said.

The building’s shell will feature structural steel atop a concrete foundation and one level of below-grade parking.

“The steel structure and concrete are going to be very conventional,” Gengler said. “We’re using side plate in lieu of brace frame construction. It’s a more expensive assembly, and it upsizes a lot of the columns, but we realize the time savings on the installation side.”

The entire project was aided by extensive use of 3-D building information modeling (BIM) and augmented reality software, Zdeblick added. These tools allowed project team members and hospital staffers to virtually inspect the new pavilion as it was designed, give feedback, and further tinker with the pieces.

“HDR created floor layouts and design elements in 3-D and gave that to our clinicians,” he said. “They were literally walking through the BIM or 3-D program and critiquing it that way.”

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A Multnomah County task force has endorsed construction of a replacement for the Burnside Bridge.

The vote Monday was in favor of a “long span,” which supporters said would offer better seismic performance and fewer columns and other impediments than would a short span.

The task force also rejected construction of a temporary bridge that would cost approximately $90 million. A temporary bridge would shave only 3-4 minutes from an average vehicle trip and lengthen construction by 18 months to two years, county staff said.

The long span would result in a very different Burnside Bridge. The current bridge, which opened in 1926, has no superstructure. The long span would require a superstructure – perhaps not unlike the cable-stayed Tilikum Crossing.

An early rendering shows two tied arches sandwiching a middle drawbridge section that would allow boats to pass underneath. Two massive columns would anchor the bridge into the Willamette River.

The conceptual illustration is not final. The bridge type – likely tied arches or cable stays – will be selected next summer.

The new bridge would also be wider by about 20 feet to provide more space to serve bus drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians. The existing bridge narrows in the middle.

Some task force members expressed aesthetic reservations, but said the advantages of a long span outweighed any drawbacks.

“It has to be done elegantly, if you can do that,” said Bill Burgel, who represents the Portland Freight Advisory Committee. “I don’t want the final result to be chaotic with the built environment.”

The task force recommendation is nonbinding. A policy group of elected leaders and agency officials will meet Oct. 2 to adopt or reject the task force’s recommendation.

Supporters said the long span would avoid unstable soils – “wiggly earth close to the river,” as described by task force member Susan Lindsay of the Buckman Community Association.

Seismic resiliency is the driving force behind the project. The existing bridge is at risk of collapse during a sizable earthquake, according to county officials and consultants. In recent years, seismologists have warned the Cascadia subduction zone could rupture, causing a devastating tremor.

The task force roundly rejected construction of a temporary bridge to serve during the main project. A temporary span was used during construction of the Sellwood Bridge replacement, but the Burnside Bridge is much more centrally located. Without a temporary bridge, traffic would be diverted to other downtown bridges during the Burnside Bridge replacement project.

Construction is expected to take 4.5 to 5.5 years.

Traffic impacts downtown could cause consternation, said Fred Cooper, a representative of the Laurelhurst Neighborhood Association.

“I see a public nightmare here if we tear down the bridge and tell them to go another route,” he said.

Another task force member said building a temporary bridge would also risk controversy.

“There’s going to be a whole lot of public backlash if we spend $90 million on a temporary bridge,” said Cameron Hunt, captain of the Portland Spirit fleet.

Some task force members expressed concern about the impacts to homeless pedestrians who must cross the river on foot.

“That will be a burden,” said Timothy Desper, director of Burnside shelter services for the Portland Rescue Mission.

A Burnside Bridge replacement project will need to undergo an environmental impact statement and win various federal approvals, including from the Coast Guard. County leaders expect to pursue Federal Highway Administration funds to help pay for the $825 million project. In November, county commissioners voted to nearly triple vehicle license fees to raise local funding for the project.

The Portland office of HDR, an Omaha, Nebraska-based engineering company, is engaged in the bridge planning effort.

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Multnomah County commissioners on Thursday OK’d studies of four possibilities for the future of Burnside Bridge.

Two of the options would involve building new bridges with a lift in the middle of the span. Another option would involve retrofitting the existing 93-year-old bridge. The final option would be to do nothing – the “no build” scenario.

The construction options range in cost from an estimated $550 million for a retrofit to $850 million for a new bridge.

Commissioners unanimously approved moving forward on an environmental impact study of the four options. They also agreed on a hefty raise to vehicle registration fees to help pay for it.

Retrofitting the Burnside Bridge or building a new one is necessary to prevent a catastrophic collapse during an earthquake, according to county officials. A sizable quake could strike Portland at any time, seismologists say, and plunge the bridge into the Willamette River. Scientists estimate there’s a 37 percent chance in the next 50 years of such an earthquake, said Chris Voss, director of the county’s Office of Emergency Management.

A timeline prepared for the Board of Commissioners would have them make a decision on the bridge’s future, known as a preferred alternative, in June 2020.

One scenario the county has jettisoned is construction of a tall, fixed-span bridge. After consulting with the Coast Guard, engineers estimated a fixed span would have to be approximately 140 feet above the river. Because tall bridges also have to be long so the grade isn’t too steep for transportation, engineers estimated the fixed span would be so long that it would touch down near 10th Avenue on each side of the river, county spokesman Mike Pullen said.

A fixed span would be far more expensive and cut off existing businesses from the bridge, Pullen said.

“You also start to change the whole street system,” he said.

Commissioners agreed to reject the idea by approving the remaining four alternatives.

Pullen said it’s too early to tell which bridge option the commissioners prefer.

“We haven’t even really done the deep level of study yet,” he said.

Portland is no stranger to lift bridges: The Broadway, Steel, Morrison and Hawthorne bridges have movable spans, as does the current Burnside Bridge.

The downside to lift bridges is inconvenience; traffic is halted when the bridge is lifted. Lift bridges also must be built to a stouter standard to withstand an earthquake if one strikes while the bridge is lifted, Pullen said.

A new Burnside Bridge would be about 20 feet wider in the middle without the existing bridge’s bell shape. It also would likely have more robust infrastructure for bicyclists and pedestrians, including a possible crash barrier.

County officials are also discussing with their city of Portland counterparts the feasibility of a westbound-only bus lane.

The county recently reconfigured the existing bridge surface to provide a bus-only lane and added plastic wands to separate bike lanes from motorized traffic.

Advocates for bicyclists and pedestrians are eager to push for expanded infrastructure on a new Burnside Bridge.

“The changes that we’ve seen for the Burnside Bridge as it exists are a step in the right direction,” said Jillian Detweiler, executive director of The Street Trust, a Portland nonprofit group that advocates for bicycling, walking and public transit. “But if they’re building a new bridge, there should really be 21st-century, top-of-the-line biking and walking infrastructure. And it’ll be nice if they’re still around after an earthquake.”

One of the bridge options would involve building a Y-shaped couplet connecting to Couch Street on the east side.

Tradespeople testified in favor of a new bridge during Thursday’s hearing. Desi Wright, a member of the Northwest Carpenters Union, said she was an apprentice during the Sellwood Bridge project and wants others to have a similar experience.

“This project would create opportunities for people entering the trades,” she said.

The Portland office of HDR, an Omaha, Nebraska-based engineering company, is engaged in the bridge planning effort. HDR evaluated the bridge’s seismic vulnerabilities and is helping design alternatives and reach out to the public.

Commissioners also voted unanimously to nearly triple vehicle registration fees, from $19 to $56, beginning Jan. 1, 2021. Money generated will help advance the project into the construction phase, officials said. The money can also be used to leverage up to $270 million in bond funding, and serves as a prerequisite to obtaining funding from federal, state and local government agencies.

“Building infrastructure is hard and it takes a lot of hard work,” Chairwoman Deborah Kafoury said. “But we’ve shown we can do projects that are hard.”

Downtown Portland needs to have a bridge that will survive a major earthquake, Kafoury added.

“We are not prepared for an earthquake today,” she said.

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It’s going to be a long-haul project for Multnomah County.

Replacing or retrofitting the venerable Burnside Bridge in Portland is among the most important tasks the county is likely to face over the next decade. On Thursday, a policy group across the Willamette River in the event of a severe earthquake met with consultants to discuss the future of the 92-year-old bridge.

“The design criteria is going to be one of the most robust set of criteria for a bridge in the United States,” said Steve Drahota, an engineering consultant with Omaha, Nebraska-based HDR. “It’s meant to serve as a lifeline, as the singular bridge that remains open after a magnitude 8 or 9 earthquake.”

A range of options was presented to the group, which consists of state, local and federal elected officials from around the region, as well as representatives of public agencies. Nine potential solutions, all but two involving full bridge replacement, have risen to the top of the list for consideration. These options come from two categories – enhanced seismic retrofit and replacement – initially presented by consultants. Others since discarded include a no-build option, a full seismic retrofit of the current bridge or enhancement of another bridge altogether.

Six screening criteria were used, said Jeff Heilman, an planning consultant with Parametrix. These were: seismic resiliency, non-motorized transportation needs, connectivity, equity, impact to the built environment and financial stewardship. The top scoring concepts were then recommended to advance to the next project phase.

“We looked at total scores and said, ‘OK, how do we land on a reasonable range to carry to the EIS (environmental impact statement)?” he said. “We want this document to be clear and understandable.”

Actual construction is probably eight to 10 years out, but potential options identified so far are likely to have a similar cost. They range from roughly $590 million for an enhanced seismic retrofit and widening of the current bridge to just shy of $750 million for a solution featuring mode-separate structures for motor vehicles and bicycles and pedestrians.

“Options evaluation is where we are now,” said Heather Catron, an HDR vice president and its director of federal transportation.

The current work is part of an ongoing feasibility study set to wrap up in September that will help identify preferred options for making the bridge earthquake-ready.

One option that didn’t make the initial cut was the proposal for a vehicular tunnel under the Willamette River that would have had to be constructed roughly 100 feet under the riverbed because of existing pipes.

“That has the highest economic displacement,” Heilman said. “The portals at the east end and the portals at the west end are huge, and we end up with 120 businesses displaced. There’s a major impact to build a tunnel, especially because it’s flat on both ends.”

Another idea that won’t be moving forward is the concept of a 120-foot-tall fixed bridge that would extend the bridgeheads much farther west and east of the current structure. Project costs for this configuration would run up to an estimated $900 million.

“One of the key problems with the 120s is the impact that they have to the built environment that’s out there,” Heilman said. “Many of them, you’re taking a bridge that currently ends about (Southwest) Second (Avenue) on the west side and you’re raising it up and taking it out to Seventh or Eighth, out to the Park Blocks.”

For comparison, he added, the Marquam Bridge, in the South Waterfront District, stands 130 feet in height.

Projected costs for all of the proposed projects include National Environmental Policy Act compliance, right-of-way acquisition, design and construction. These costs are escalated to the year of construction between 2026 and 2028.

The county will perform additional community outreach this summer, with public open houses set for June and July. Following that, the county board of commissioners will need to approve a final range of alternatives, purpose and need, likely later in the fall.

Then consultants will be able to forge ahead in work with county, state and federal officials to develop a draft environmental impact statement. That process could take up to two years to complete.

Sources of funding have not yet been identified, but a sizable federal component would likely be required to make the project feasible. One option is to toll the bridge in a fashion similar to what is being considered for interstates 5 and 205 in the metro area.

“We haven’t talked about tolling yet,” Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson said. “I think as we move into this there will be a larger conversation about how to fund the design and construction phase; we haven’t had that chat yet.”

The post Burnside Bridge seismic options discussed appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

A tunnel under the Willamette River is still an option on the table for replacing the aging and vulnerable Burnside Bridge.

The alternative was discussed last week at a coffee-and-pizza stakeholders meeting facilitated by the agency in charge of the 91-year-old span, Multnomah County.

Officials are considering how to shore up the 17-mile “Burnside Corridor” – Burnside Street from U.S. Route 26 to Gresham – as a “lifeline” through the Portland-metro area, with the bridge over the Willamette River an acknowledged weak link.

A tunnel, however, is considered a highly unlikely solution, for reasons including high energy consumption and lack of space for terminals. What’s looking more and more likely is that all or parts of the Burnside Bridge will need to be replaced to provide a regional lifeline in the case of a major seismic event.

Other options that fared poorly in the assessment by the county’s consultants include preserving the Burnside Bridge, performing a full retrofit, and bolstering a different bridge, such as the Morrison. Though these alternatives scored low, planners cautioned nothing has been decided yet.

The county’s project manager, Megan Neill, said the “universe of options” for a Burnside Bridge upgrade is expected to be reduced enough by next fall for a recommendation to be presented to the Board of County Commissioners. After approval, around a decade could pass before project completion.

The meeting of stakeholders was the second of four. Interested parties have included the Old Town Chinatown Community Association, the Central Eastside Industrial Council, the Portland Saturday Market and Burnside Skatepark users. Wide-ranging discussions at this meeting and previous ones have covered how Portland will respond to a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake – specifically, how it will clear debris and kick-start commerce.

The project is one of several efforts by governments in the region to prepare for fallout of a major quake. Metro is drafting a debris management plan, and the Portland Bureau of Transportation is preparing a plan for transportation recovery and a plan for upgrading unreinforced masonry buildings.

Dan Yates, director of the Portland Spirit, said his business signed an agreement with the city years ago to provide ferry service across the Willamette River in case of a major disaster.

He and others mused at the meeting about how Portlanders would respond when tested by disaster.

“I bet this city surprises itself,” he said. “People will do remarkable things after a big event.”

None of inner Portland’s bridges are expected to fare well in a major earthquake. Even TriMet‘s young Tilikum Crossing is compromised by highly liquefiable soil beneath its approaches. The county’s two most recent large bridge replacements, the Sauvie Island Bridge ($48 million) and the Sellwood Bridge ($215 million), both meet current seismic code, but the crossings aren’t considered good seismic lifelines due to their locations and other factors.

“It’s really a call to action,” Neill said. “People wonder why we’re focusing on a bridge in Portland, but we feel it’s important to the entire region to restore service to the Burnside.”

Like the Tilikum Crossing, the soils under the Burnside Bridge are highly liquefiable and expected at the east approach to move toward the river more than 20 feet. This will have to be addressed in whichever plan is adopted.

One space likely to be significantly affected is the Burnside Skatepark, which was constructed off-the-books in the 1990s among the bridge abutments on the bridge’s east side.

“It feels to me that there are going to be some kind of impacts to the skate park no matter what alternative we talk about,” said Jeff Heilman of consultancy Parametrix. “There are certainly needs in those existing columns.”

The skate park’s designated representative was not in attendance Thursday.

Stakeholders at the meeting acknowledged another major challenge: informing constituents. The county recently scored a win in this regard. It paid $135,000 to engineering firm HDR to create a realistic video rendering of the bridge during an earthquake. It’s so far gotten more than 50,000 views.

(Editor’s note: This story has been modified from an original version to reflect the correct price for a video rendering of the Burnside Bridge during an earthquake.)

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Historically, architecture and engineering have primarily attracted white males. But even though more women and minorities are studying to enter the fields, they aren’t necessarily choosing to start such careers or stick with them.

According to the American Institute of Architects, 45 percent of architecture schools’ graduates are women, and 39 percent of architecture firms’ interns are women. But only 25 percent of professional architects are women, and just 17 percent of firms’ principals are women, the AIA reported.

The numbers are even more striking for the engineering profession. Though in the 1980s, on average, women accounted for just 5.8 percent of the industry’s workforce, even now they account for only 14 percent, according to a report by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee.

Yet the professional traits of architecture and engineering that draw men also, by and large, draw women. A love of design, math and/or science often is cited. Early exposure to related fields can be crucial.

“My dad was a carpenter,” said Gabrielle Riley, an associate and architectural designer with ZGF Architects. “My dad was passionate about his work. I used to go to work with my dad a lot.”

Architecture gave the 27-year-old Tuskegee University graduate a way to combine her design skills with many of the activities she enjoyed sharing with her dad. But Riley knows now that she is a rarity in the field: Fewer than 2 percent of American architects are African-American.

“I was pretty naive about architecture and didn’t really know what I was getting into,” she said. “I just saw blueprints and I’m like, I want to draw these.”

According to some engineers and architects who work in the Portland area, their fields are sorely lacking role models resembling the overall diverse workforce in the U.S.

Riley has noticed a distinct lack of black women architects able to serve as mentors to her or others. Sofia Chavez Cruz, a junior studying architecture at Portland State University, said it seems to her that few women are practicing the profession.

“It’s important for women to be visible in the field,” she said, and added that the lack of women “makes it harder to be a minority in a field that heavily relies on mentors.”

The problem is that because the industry has few women and minorities, few are available to serve as advocates.

“People tend to mentor for people that are like them,” said Daniella Moreano Wahler, an associate at PAE Engineers. “It’s not that (white men) don’t want women (or minorities) around; it’s that they tend to mentor people who are like themselves. It’s human nature.”

That lack of mentorship can impact students’ decisions made even in high school.

“Where I went to high school, in the engineering class where I got interested in architecture, there were only men,” said Kyhetica Lattin, a PSU junior from Corvallis. “There was only one other girl and she dropped out.”

Students must rely largely on outreach efforts like the ACE mentor program, which aims to bring architecture and engineering professionals into public schools to promote careers in their fields. The American Institute of Architects also has several outreach programs.

Meanwhile, PSU’s Green Building Scholars program has a mentorship aspect intended to help students get a grasp of what to expect following graduation.

“We just started a mentorship program where we pair one student with a professional in the field here in Portland,” said Kalina Vander Poel, who in 2016 received a master’s in architecture from PSU.

Vander Poel is overseeing the program while Green Building Scholars program director Corey Griffin is on sabbatical in Ireland. The mentors discuss a variety of issues tied to life after graduation, she said.

“They just fire away with questions about good, healthy work-life balance,” she said. “They discuss what it is like to work in the profession here in Portland, what their experiences are as a young professional versus being a student. They try to bridge that gap between academia and being a new professional.”

Attracting and keeping women and minorities in Portland after graduation can be a challenge. The city may be known as a trendy place appealing to young people, but also as one predominantly white. Riley said she was eager to join ZGF here rather than another firm in a more ethnically diverse metro area such as Washington, D.C.

“It was the opportunity to work with the firm,” she said. “I knew Portland had a reputation as a white city, but I didn’t see it as a challenge. It was an opportunity to work with a good firm that opened their arms to me, so why let color get in the way of that?”

The top reasons cited by women in a 2016 AIA survey for leaving the profession were: better opportunities (49 percent), lack of advancement (24 percent) and low pay (20 percent). But some women are sticking around. Kathy Shaloo Berg, a partner at ZGF, said the architecture industry has made strides in the 20 years that she has been in it.

As more women enter upper levels of management, the transition for women newcomers should become smoother, Berg said.

“It’s tough,” she said. “We can solve the gender problem by hiring more equally for people coming out of school. We can’t fix the racial challenge we have because we aren’t getting the different groups into college in first place.”

Architecture and engineering firms are beginning to find ways to keep women, at least, in their respective fields. One big change that occurred in the past decade is improvement in family leave policies.

Federal law requires businesses to offer up to 12 weeks of unpaid family leave – to either women or men. Some companies have policies that offer even more time off.

Jennie Cambier, a senior associate at Opsis Architecture, took six months off when she had her first child and then four more months when she had her second child.

“I think one of the things Opsis is doing is recognizing that people need to have work-life balance and that there are demands outside of the office,” she said. “I feel pretty fortunate that the firm has responded to my needs.”

PAE Engineers recently made available six weeks of paid leave for any employee who has had a child or needs to take care of a sick family member.

“One of the key reasons was to help attract more women to stay within the industry,” said Shiloh Butterworth, director of employee experience at PAE Engineers. “We are trying to bring in a more diverse workforce. We can set up young women 10 to 15 years down the road to be successful in the industry.”

“That policy is very helpful,” said Wahler, who is expecting her first child in two months. “It helps retain engineers. It has to be gender-neutral. It helps send the message that family care isn’t just on women.”

While efforts are being made to increase diversity in the architecture and engineering industries, new issues will need to be addressed, said Nicki Pozos, a client development leader at HDR.

“In our hope for diversity, we can’t just trade out four white guys for some women,” she said. “It’s not enough to put a woman in a position and expect them to act like a man.”

True diversity means incorporating the different perspectives that people bring to a workplace, Pozos said. Awareness of the struggles experienced by minorities in the field also is important, she added.

“We had one black man here and he left,” she said. “It takes a certain kind of person to be that one guy. We have to get past our blindness to that fact.”

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The employees at HDR‘s Portland office recently took advantage of an opportunity to let their hair down for a good cause. A dozen engineers, accountants and financial professionals grew beards for several weeks and then held an auction for them to shave their beards in outrageous ways and wear them to work the following day.

The participants worked with Movember, a nonprofit group, to raise money for prostate cancer research. But the event is for more than a good cause.

“It’s really a good time,” said Kevin Johns, organizer of the HDR Portland event since 2010. “We have a few beers while we do the presentation and everyone sorta loosens up. It gets to be pretty funny.”

A PowerPoint presentation explains the charity and the methods of the event to the assembled employees and includes a number of “before and after” photos of previous years’ participants.  Those who volunteer to grow beards are then auctioned off and subject to shaving their beard according to the wishes of the highest bidder. Besides the typical “shave half of your face” beard, some of the designs can get quite creative, according to Johns.

On “Movember Day,” held this year on Nov. 24, the participants wear their engineered beards for the entire work day, eliciting chuckles, headshakes and smiles throughout the office.

HDR will match this year’s pledged amounts with an additional $1,000 to bring the total amount raised for November 2015 to $4,600.

HDR will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2017. The company has grown from a single office to become a global firm with more than 10,000 employees, including nearly 200 in Portland.

“As far as I know, Portland is the only (HDR) office participating in Movember,” said Lisa Snowden, who handles media relations for the firm. “But each office has their favored charities and community projects, and HDR is committed to support them.”

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Multnomah County Board of Commissioners chairwoman Deborah Kafoury knew what was coming at Thursday’s board briefing on the seismic safety of the county’s bridges in downtown Portland.

“It’s just a time for us to get scared so we’re afraid to drive across bridges,” she said. “I’m noticing a trend with these conversations and I don’t like it.”

Sure enough, Ian Cannon, county bridge engineering services manager, and consultant Steve Drahota, vice president of HDR‘s Portland office, warned that the historic Broadway, Burnside, Morrison and Hawthorne bridges all are in danger of failing in a major earthquake. To illustrate this potential scenario, Drahota shared photos of bridges dramatically damaged during earthquakes in California, Japan and Chile.

But the idea wasn’t to frighten county commissioners, he explained. It was to show that past mistakes in bridge design inform engineers on how to make new and existing structures seismically safer.

“The intent of my presentation is to take the lessons from those other events and what we can learn from those and apply that to our bridges,” he told commissioners. “Those catastrophes, we learn from them.”

Drahota, a senior engineer at HDR, has designed more than 30 bridge retrofits in California and written seismic retrofit standards for the Oregon Department of Transportation. He is the technical lead on an update to the Multnomah County Willamette River Bridges Capital Improvement Plan. The looks at the current conditions and maintenance needs of the county’s six crossings over the Willamette River and their risks of sustaining damage in an impending high-magnitude earthquake near the Oregon coastline.

In recent years, county officials have focused on replacing two of the neediest bridges. The Sauvie Island Bridge was rebuilt in 2008 and the new Sellwood Bridge is scheduled to open in fall 2015. The updated capital improvement plan centers on the county’s four other bridges – the Broadway, Burnside, Morrison and Hawthorne – and includes seismic evaluations of them. All four are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Hawthorne and Broadway bridges are more than 100 years old.

A draft plan scheduled to be released early next year will include cost estimates for seismic retrofits of the county’s oldest bridges, Cannon said.

“They were all designed before seismic (risk) was a consideration,” he said. “The plan is a blueprint or a road map into the future. The next step is doing a little bit more research to figure out how we’ll get the funding.”

The four downtown bridges share similar seismic vulnerabilities, Drahota said. This includes the potential for the deck to fall from its supports when the soil under it liquefies, columns collapsing, trusses breaking apart and failure of mechanical and electrical components.

“The era of design takes itself to a place where the details of the vulnerabilities are carried all the way through,” he said.

Much can be done to fix these issues, Drahota said, such as installing seismic braces and performing an extensive overhaul where the columns are replaced.

“Our past is what we need to correct,” he said. “The technology is there to make them more seismic resistant.”

This is where learning from past bridge failures in earthquakes comes in handy, he said. Small details, such as how a bridge column is constructed, can make a huge difference in whether the structure collapses in an earthquake, Drahota said.

“Every little detail has to be thought about to make sure you have a safe structure,” he said. “We can make improvements that can save our bridges.”

These improvements won’t be cheap, Drahota said, but he encouraged county commissioners to seek funding for seismic upgrades before a tragedy strikes.

“It takes courage to go and get a funding package before an earthquake event has happened,” he said.

County commissioner Jules Bailey agreed that it wouldn’t be prudent to wait until after an earthquake to retrofit the bridges.

“We need to get on this,” he said. “There is a lot of work to get done. It’s obviously a critical need and it’s all-hands-on-deck time.”

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Nicki Pozos is one of a new breed of engineers. In addition to being a licensed civil engineer in Oregon and California, she has training and experience as a life coach. That combination of technical and “soft” skills allows her to spend one day handling marketing as the client development leader in HDR‘s Portland office and another serving as project principal for an $80 million water-supply project.

In her 15 years as an engineering consultant, she has been involved in decisions for infrastructure projects totaling more than $1 billion. Her wealth of experience is being passed on as Pozos serves as a mentor for women both in her firm and with other companies. She has served as a speaker at national, regional and local conferences on topics that include generational differences, mentoring and building a leadership. She has presented at events organized by Women’s Transportation Seminar, the Society of Women Engineers, and the Women in Leadership Symposium in Oregon and Washington.

She has filled leadership roles with the Pacific Northwest section of the American Water Works Association and serves on the Utility Management Committee for the Oregon Association for Clean Water Agencies.

She also volunteers with Water For People, a nonprofit dedicated to helping provide water and sanitation for families; and was one of the founders of the Water For People gala held in Portland every year. Her work with the organization was honored with a Kenneth J. Miller Award in 2014 for outstanding service as a volunteer.

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The chances of an extreme storm system rolling through western Oregon before 2014 are less than 4 percent. But those odds were threatening enough to trigger significant changes to construction plans for the replacement of two aging Interstate-84 bridges near Troutdale.

The Oregon Department of Transportation initially contracted to use traditional bridge-building methods. But after the general contractor started working in summer 2010, a report revealed that if a flood were to occur when the project was in full swing, the amount of equipment and material the company had in the water would raise water levels enough that wreckage would increase drastically. So they came up with another plan.

“This is a situation that could have been very contentious,” said Byron Perry, deputy program manager for , a joint venture of and with offices in Salem and Troutdale. “We were able to work together to develop an approach that lets us reduce our impact as much as we practically can and still get the job done in a reasonable time.”

But the new plan also increases the project’s cost by approximately $5 million and extends the schedule by a year. The budget for the entire project is now approximately $83 million, according to Jim Cox, ODOT’s bridge delivery unit manager.

Springfield-based Hamilton Construction initially planned to build a detour bridge for rerouted traffic and two temporary work bridges while the permanent east- and westbound bridges were built. But after realizing the increased flood risk, ODOT, Hamilton and Oregon Bridge Delivery Partners discussed several options and ultimately decided to use an innovative top-down construction method, which reduces impacts to water levels.

Hamilton will use a gantry crane to carry girders out to designated placements, thereby eliminating the need for one of the new work bridges in the river. The tracks that guide the crane’s base across the river extend for 840 feet – the same length as the bridges themselves. The two tracks must be aligned exactly 90 feet apart.

The gantry system has not been used on bridges in Oregon before, according to Cox. Gantry cranes are more typically used to hoist materials in shipyards and other industrial settings.

Hamilton purchased the $1.2 million gantry crane, which was delivered from Boston in nine truckloads. Three operators and two foremen went through special gantry crane training for the project, and crews are now doing trial runs in preparation for work on the eastbound bridge.

Wendell Snook, a project manager for Hamilton, hopes that the investment in training and equipment will pay off, but he says it may be too soon to tell.

“We’ll know a lot more in six months,” he said. “Whether we’re buying more (gantry cranes) or looking for a buyer, we’re learning a lot and are pretty optimistic.”

Even with the altered construction plans, however, the project will impact water levels in the Sandy River. The area is already susceptible to flooding because the bridges span a delta near the river’s confluence with the Columbia River. When both rivers back up, water is pushed to the delta and levels rise.

The last major flood to hit the area occurred in 1996, when riverside properties around Troutdale were damaged and one person died. The probability of a “100-year storm” occurring over the four-year construction period for the Sandy River bridges, according to ODOT estimates, is 3.94 percent.

ODOT built a temporary flood barrier on the west bank of the Sandy River and is reimbursing potentially affected property owners and renters for flood insurance premiums through the end of the project, which is expected by spring 2014.

After Hamilton crews finish the eastbound bridge this summer, they will move to the westbound bridge and use the detour bridge as the new work bridge. The completed eastbound bridge will have the capacity to carry detoured traffic traveling in both directions.

And although the innovative construction method will have almost no impact on the final appearance of the bridge, Snook hopes it will encourage more creativity in the building community.

“Maybe we’ve been tunnel-visioned into relying on the hoist-type machines that we always use,” he said. “This is opening up possibilities and letting the imagination start to run wild.”

Snook also said that if a prospective buyer made an offer for the gantry crane, Hamilton Construction would be willing to entertain it.

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