Bridge contract now expected within a year

By M. Patricia Titus
News Editor

“We’re close to putting out a request for qualifications,” Cole told the Coastal Point on Tuesday.

The RFQ process, Cole said, is designed to allow the state to determine what kind of resources a potential bidder in the design-build project can put together, such as the design team that will produce the final plans for the new bridge.

“This is not only a construction project but a design project,” Cole emphasized. “They’ll have to come up with a team to bid on the project.”

Cole said the RFQ is “very close” to being ready, with expectations that it will be done within the month.

From there, Cole said the project will go to the “request for proposals,” or RFP, phase, when actual proposals will come in from the qualified companies and will be examined by state officials for which proposal they will select for the final project.

“We expect to have the contract awarded within a year,” Cole said Oct. 9, adding that construction could begin soon thereafter.

That year cannot come too soon for many of the area’s residents and visitors, whose concerns about the safety of the existing Indian River Inlet Bridge were substantially heightened in the wake of the sudden and fatal collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis this August.

Previous estimates of the Indian River Inlet Bridge’s lifespan were reported at ending anywhere between 2008 and 2012 – the latter now an early estimate for the completion of the new bridge. The Minneapolis collapse has added new urgency to those ongoing concerns.

“In the last couple of months, there’s been a lot of activity down there,” Cole acknowledged this week, noting an enhanced schedule of bridge inspections, installation of new monitoring equipment and even an underwater inspection of the bridge’s foundations from which the results are expected in the next week or two.

“We’re trying to be as transparent as possible,” Cole emphasized. “Our intent is to make sure that the public is fully aware of everything happening with that bridge. And when we have found the path forward, we will make sure everyone knows about it.”

Cole reiterated that state officials consider the bridge to be safe — despite the undermining of its foundations by the scouring affect of strong tides at the inlet.

“This is the most-monitored bridge in the state,” Cole said. “The bridge is safe. If it weren’t, we’d close it.

“We know it needs to be replaced,” he added. “That’s why we’re going through this process.”

The process to construct a replacement bridge at the inlet reached a sudden halt earlier this year, when state officials withdrew the awarding of the design-build contract to a Florida company after complaints from state labor union leaders that Delaware unionized companies had offered the best proposal.

DelDOT requested that state legislators provide more specific rules regarding the process to be used for the bidding and evaluation of the proposals, and they got that this summer. But the entire process was taken back to square one, leading to its present position once again at the RFQ stage.

That delay came on the heels of an initial bidding process for a state-of-the-art cable-stayed bridge that bid out well beyond what the state’s strapped transportation budget would allow. That design process was also aborted at the contract awarding stage.

“We’ve certainly run into a number of roadblocks on this project,” Cole agreed Tuesday. “But we’re continuing to plug along. We can’t do any better than that. We can’t magically wish things were different.”

Cole outright rejected there being any truth to rumors that have been circulating in recent weeks that pressure was being exerted to narrow the bidding process only to unionized Delaware companies.

“That’s not true. It’s ridiculous,” Cole stated emphatically.

Meanwhile, along with the underwater inspections of the old bridge, transportation inspectors have also been looking at the approaches to the new bridge, which had been undergoing construction right up until this summer’s contract award was scrapped. They’re looking at how much settlement has taken place on the approaches and evaluating what impact that process might have on the overall project.

“What we’ve run into on the approaches has been a settlement problem,” Cole said. “Whenever you build those kinds of approaches, there’s always a geological factor. You can’t always determine how it’s going to settle. And it has to have settled 100 percent before you build.”

Cole said, however, that the unexpected delays in beginning construction on the new bridge did not impact the settlement of the approaches in any negative manner.

“Time, if anything, has helped it,” he said. “The more time it has to settle, the better.”

Cole said the approaches appeared to have settled in ways that were not necessarily ideal, but that final analysis of how to handle the settlement had not yet been completed.

“We’re not sure how that part of it is going to resolve itself,” he said. “We’re trying to wrestle with that, to determine how that fits into our path forward. And once we announce the RFQ, it will become clear what we’re going to do with that.”

Cole said DelDOT officials were not sure whether the settlement might mean a major reworking is necessary for the bridge approaches before the construction of the new bridge can begin.

“We’re looking at several things,” he said. “We can wait for it to settle more. Or we can try to redo what we’ve already done. Those are two of the possibilities.”