December 2017 – TWM was recently awarded the Illinois AGC Contractor of the Year Award in conjunction with Keller Construction for our combined efforts on IDOT’s Pocahontas Bridge Slide project.

According to Infrastructure Quarterly’s (Volume 5 Issue 1) article on bridge slides, “Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) methodology seeks to reduce construction duration and impacts on traffic. Additional benefits include improving work zone safety, eliminating temporary roadway construction, decreasing post-construction repairs to detour routes and reducing user costs. As bridge repair and replacement becomes increasingly more important throughout the nation, transportation officials are looking to utilize ABC methods.”

IDOT is obviously striving to incorporate accelerated bridge construction into their methodology for replacing aging bridges due to the many benefits associated with it. The Pocahontas Bridge Slide was IDOT’s first successful project of this type, and given its success, TWM is confident the public will see many more like it in the future.

For this project, TWM provided engineering services for the bridge slide which included calculations and details for the following: temporary abutments, lateral slide system, geometry control plan and vertical jacking plan.

A 108’ single-span superstructure was constructed on temporary abutments and slid laterally 39’ onto permanent abutments. Temporary abutments consisted of driven H-piles with pre-cast concrete slabs on top of a pair of 33” rolled beams. H-piles had to be driven offset of center of the temporary abutments for clearance to power lines, which created significant differential deflections as the superstructure was built.

TWM accurately predicted deflections, thereby keeping distortion of the superstructure within tight specification tolerances.

Please visit our Awards page to learn more.