The Maryland Board of Public Works approved a $75 million contract Wednesday to hire three firms that will oversee construction management services on the Francis Scott Key Bridge, as the replacement project gets under way this spring.
The companies, a consortium calling itself 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, that it’s built sustainably and smoothly and importantly, as swiftly as possible,” said Gov. Wes Moore, in a statement, one of three members of the board along with Comptroller Brooke Lierman and Treasurer Dereck Davis.
It has been just over 10 months since the container ship Dali lost power as it was leaving the Port of Baltimore early on the morning of March 26 and ran into a support for the Key Bridge, killing six construction workers as it collapsed into the Patapsco River.
Current plans call for a replacement bridge to follow the same path of the old bridge, and to be four lanes wide, as the original bridge was. But the new Key Bridge would be much higher and wider than the old bridge, to allow for the possibility of even larger cargo ships in the future.
Preliminary plans envision a bridge span 230 feet above the river at its highest point, compared to 185 feet before, with piers supporting the center span 1,400 feet apart instead of 1,200.
In order to accommodate the higher span in the same footprint, the new bridge will likely be a cable-stayed design as opposed the truss style of the old span. The project is expected to take years to complete and cost more than $1.7 billion.
The Bridging Maryland Partnership is made up of WSP USA out of New York, Johnson Mirmiran & Thompson based in Hunt Valley, and Rummel, Klepper & Kahl of Baltimore. The contract awarded Wednesday calls for “a wide range of professional engineering consulting areas, including transportation planning, project planning, land surveying, public involvement, forestry and landscape architecture, environmental sciences, project management and engineering services,” according to board documents.
Bruce Gartner, the executive director of the MTA, said residents near the bridge can expect to start seeing preconstruction work this month, on land and in the water.
Source: The Baltimore Banner, Yahoo.com
