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Bridge in Etna nearing finish
Sunday, September 02, 2001 By Joe Grata, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
A dozen piers resembling giant concrete golf tees in a row reflect the status of building a wider Route 28 southbound bridge in Etna.
But are 12 weeks enough time to finish the bridge and reopen the closed stretch of highway by Thanksgiving?
"We think so," said Joe Primo, a project coordinator for Michael Baker Jr., a consulting firm hired by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to help manage five miles and $24 million worth of construction activity this summer on Route 28, also known as the Allegheny Valley Expressway.
"The job is a lot further along than it looks," Primo said. "The contractor is ready to blitz ... to set up a production line -- set steel, place forms, lay rebar and pour concrete, all taking place at the same time, in sequence."
Workers began erecting steel beams Wednesday night -- 500 tons of them, trucked to the job site from Lancaster -- after spending nearly six months tearing down a single-lane bridge that stood for 43 years, rebuilding pier caps and doing preparatory work.
The new bridge will be wider, enabling two lanes of Route 28 southbound "thru" traffic to bypass Etna at the Route 8 interchange instead of one, thereby alleviating a bottleneck and improving safety.
Drivers of an estimated 58,000 vehicles a day have been affected by the Etna work and two adjacent Route 28 projects, limiting them to one lane in each direction and detouring them to the Highland Park Bridge and local, secondary roads since March.
While Route 28 southbound has been closed to all but Route 8 northbound traffic beyond the Highland Park Bridge, PennDOT has used the opportunity to resurface the road and redeck bridges crossing Kittanning Pike and Boy Scouts Reservation Road.
That stretch is to be reopened by Thanksgiving, the same time as the Etna bridge.
Between Highland Park Bridge and Powers Run Road in O'Hara, PennDOT is spending $12.5 million to repave 4.2 miles of Route 28, renovate more bridges, improve exit and entry ramps and add safety features.
PennDOT rolled back the orange-and-white construction barrels on the northbound side Friday, reopening both lanes toward Route 910 and Harmarville. The southbound lanes are to be completed no later than the end of this month.
The most noticeable difference is the ride.
"It's super smooth," PennDOT construction engineer Brad Miller said. "When we survey customers, smooth roads are their top priority."
A device using a laser beam measures deviations in pavement smoothness in inches per mile to determine an International Roughess Index. Pennsylvania's interstates have improved to an IRI of 88, meaning that pavement deviations over an average mile total 88 inches, or 4 inches less than the national average.
Route 28, whose IRI had been 140 through O'Hara, is now at 35, an almost unheard of number in the region.
Miller and Primo said cooperation from contractors had made it possible for PennDOT to accomplish the $12.5 million repaving and improvement project between the Highland Park Bridge and Powers Run Road in one year instead of two years as originally planned.
The accelerated program has helped appease UPMC St. Margaret and affected businesses such as those in RIDC Park, Waterworks Mall and Fox Chapel Shopping Plaza.
"I'm not saying anybody is thrilled to have us here," Primo said, "but they've been cooperative. We've had no real clashes."
No major road construction is scheduled on Route 28 next construction season. But next year will be the calm before a storm of traffic restrictions that are to resume in 2003 and continue through mid-2009, including another four construction seasons to finish Etna interchange improvements.
The timetable does not include realigning a dangerous Route 8 stretch known as the "Mae West Bend," repairing the 31st Street and 16th Street bridges in the Route 28 corridor and building a direct connection from Route 28 to Interstate 279.
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