'Significant' flaws: Partially built Beltway 8 Bridge over Houston Ship Channel will be demolished

[TexasTowelie]

'Significant' flaws: Partially built Beltway 8 Bridge over Houston Ship Channel will be demolished due to design errors


Harris County commissioners voted Tuesday to demolish and rebuild parts of the under-construction Beltway 8 bridge over the Houston Ship Channel after the original designs were found to have "significant" flaws. The setback will cost the county $291 million, including $50 million to demolish some sections that have already been built, according to the Houston Chronicle's Dug Begley.

This development will push completion of the first span of the new bridge to 2025, and the second span to 2027. The engineering firm and contractor behind the designs, FIGG Bridge Group, attempted a new technique after winning its bid to replace the old span, which was built in 1982. FIGG's new construction method involved fabricating sections of new roadway on the ground and hoisting the segments into place. Work on the new Beltway 8 Bridge began in 2018, the same year another FIGG-constructed bridge collapsed near Florida International University in Miami, killing six people and putting the company's practices into question.

In 2019, Harris County hired COWI, another engineering firm, to study FIGG's original designs and determine if they were safe, according to David Arminas in World Highways. By that time, work had already began on some of the new bridge's tallest support structures that would eventually link to cables suspending the roadway. COWI determined that there were 21 different "significant" design flaws, which halted construction work altogether.

"The previous design was flawed," Harris County Toll Road Authority executive director Roberto Trevino told Begley. "It would have led to failure of the bridge."

Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/transportation/article/beltway-8-ship-channel-bridge-16666578.php

[LuckyLib]

1. A Texas boondoggle! Who could have imagined?

Follow the money!

[keithbvadu2]

2. Cozy relationships - contractor and approving officials?

It took two years of expense to finally kill the suspected project.

A delay would have cost money but undoubtedly less than building and then destroying and starting over.

[Javaman]

5. my first thought as well.

either laundering money or stretching out the determination so as to garner, whomever is involved, that much more of a pay out.

this is texas after all.

[NCjack]

3. When the next book on Great Planning Disasters is written, the bridge over

the Houston Ship Channel should have its own chapter.

[LeftInTX]

4. Holy cow! That would have been a disaster!

Hopefully they halted construction shortly after the Miami disaster. The bridge in Miami was apparently a pedestrian bridge.

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2018/03/15/scott-to-go-to-fiu-after-bridge-collapse-8725756