The Board of Public Works approved a $75 million contract Wednesday to hire three firms to oversee construction management services for the Francis Scott Key Bridge as the replacement project gets underway in earnest this spring.
The companies, a consortium called the Bridging Maryland Partnership, will be responsible for planning, engineering, surveying, construction management and more.
“The Bridging Maryland Partnership is responsible for ensuring that this bridge is built safely, sustainably, smoothly and, most importantly, as quickly as possible,” said Gov. Wes Moore (D), one of three board members alongside Comptroller Brooke Lierman and Treasurer Dereck Davis .
It has been just over ten months since the container ship Dali lost power while leaving the port of Baltimore early on the morning of March 26 and struck a Key Bridge support, which plunged into the Patapsco River within seconds.
The collapse killed six road workers who were repairing the bridge at the time, jammed the Dali and washed thousands of tons of debris into the Patapsco River, blocking the channel through which ships enter and exit the port. It also cut a key route for truck traffic around Baltimore and closed a toll road that carries more than 30,000 vehicles daily, resulting in $56 million in annual tolls.
Federal and state officials immediately pledged to rebuild the bridge, with President Joe Biden pledging that the federal government would fully fund the project. By June, salvage crews had freed the Dali and reopened shipping lanes to the port, and in August the state awarded a contract to Kiewit Infrastructure as the contractor for the project.
Current plans call for a replacement bridge that follows the path of the old bridge and will be four lanes wide like the original bridge. But the new Key Bridge would be much higher and wider than the old bridge to allow for the use of even larger cargo ships in the future. Preliminary plans call for a bridge with a span of 230 feet over the river at its highest point, compared to 185 feet previously, with piers supporting the middle span at a distance of 1,400 feet instead of 1,200 feet.
To accommodate the larger span in the same footprint, the new bridge will likely have a cable-stayed structure rather than the truss structure of the old span. The project is expected to take years to complete and cost more than $1.7 billion – some of which has already been recovered through lawsuits against the Dali's owners.
Moore praised the work of the state's congressional delegation in securing a commitment to 100 percent federal funding for the bridge project last month; the Army Corps of Engineers, which cleared the shipping channel to the Port of Baltimore in just over 11 weeks instead of the 11 months originally predicted; and the Maryland Transportation Authority, which worked “around the clock” to get to this point.
“The fact that you moved so quickly was not only important, but it gave us great confidence by demonstrating our commitment that we will get this done on time and on budget,” Moore said on meet Wednesday. “Because without a Key Bridge there cannot be a fully functioning Port of Baltimore. Point.”
The Bridging Maryland Partnership consists of New York-based WSP USA, Hunt Valley-based Johnson Mirmiran & Thompson and Baltimore-based Rummel, Klepper & Kahl. The contract awarded Wednesday calls for “a broad range of professional engineering consulting areas, including transportation planning, project planning, land surveying, public participation, forestry and landscape architecture, environmental science, project management and engineering services,” board documents said.
Bruce Gartner, the MTA's executive director, said residents near the bridge can expect pre-construction work on land and water later this month, where “boats, small barges and small cranes” will drill and collect soil samples and mapping the river channel. This work is not expected to significantly impact traffic on the roads or in the harbor channel, he said.
“Probably one of the most anticipated milestones, the demolition of the existing piers, is scheduled for this spring,” Gartner told the board. “We are continuing to develop the… preliminary designs and hope to share them with you in the near future so you can participate in some of these design elements.”
The board members had few questions, but lots of praise for the project managers.
“It's really impressive. “It’s exciting to get started,” Lierman said after Gartner’s appearance.
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