Tag Archives: Foundation Failure

Bridge Foundations

Raising the Leo Frigo Bridge

Work to begin lifting the sagging portions of the Leo Frigo Memorial Bridge on I-43 in Green Bay, Wisconsin is scheduled to begin Tuesday.  According to the Green Bay Press Gazette,  Zenith Tech Inc. is working on the repairs.  It will be a BIG lift, indeed…..

Raising the troubled Leo Frigo Memorial Bridge back into place will be a task equivalent to hoisting an entire fleet of 747s into the air.

Experts have calculated that the sagging section of Green Bay’s distressed bridge weighs more than 3 million pounds, or about 1,600 tons.

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Zenith Tech crews are expected to spend several days using hydraulic jacks to boost the Leo Frigo back into position — a process that will go slow, by design.

……

Starting with the northbound lanes, Zenith Tech will insert 10 hydraulic jacks beneath the bridge deck and operate them all simultaneously to raise the platform. Each jack will be exerting enough pressure to support 183,000 pounds, although Dreher said their capacity is 50 percent greater than that — just in case it is needed.

Dreher said the jacks will be calibrated carefully to operate in perfect unison, so there is no risk of the bridge deck leaning one way or the other as it is elevated.

“You can’t just go in there and start jacking away,” he said. “It definitely takes some coordination and good communication.

A very challenging and interesting repair project.  Kudos to the Wisconsin DOT and all involved in getting the repairs done quickly.

See our previous posts here.

Bridge Foundations, Drilled Shafts, Foundation Testing, Miscellaneous

Leo Frigo Bridge–Repair Design

The Wisconsin DOT was set to request bids this week for repairs to the Leo Frigo Memorial Bridge on I-43 in Green Bay, with an anticipated start of construction on November 4th and reopening of the bridge on January 17th.  The repair will consist of using drilled shafts installed adjacent to the existing piers with a post-tensioned extension of the pile cap to transfer the loads to the shafts.  A schematic of the design from Wisconsin DOT (via Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel)

Scot Becker, director of the Bureau of Structures and the state’s bridge engineer, said the fix will consist of installing four concrete shafts beneath five affected piers to take over support from corroded underground steel structures, called pilings. Then, the bridge itself will be jacked up 2 feet, and concrete and steel will be poured to keep the bridge in position.

The bridge, which spans the Fox River in Green Bay, has been closed since late September, after pilings became corroded and buckled under one of the piers, causing a 400-foot-long section of the bridge to sink 2 feet. Since then, it has drooped another half inch, and the state is monitoring the bridge for further movement.

An investigation concentrating mainly in the area from Quincy St. to the Fox River found that soil surrounding the pier contained industrial byproducts over wetlands, which caused the corrosion.

Temporary supports are already being installed by Lunda to shore up the sagging spans until the repairs can be completed.

The Green Bay Press Gazette has a page archiving all of their stories, videos, photos, etc. concerning this event.

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Terzaghi & History

Happy Karl Terzaghi’s Birthday 2013!

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Happy Karl Terzaghi’s Birthday, my friends!  Yes, it is time to raise our coffee, espresso, tea, wine, beer or other beverage to toast the Father of Modern Soil Mechanics as has been our custom here at the DBA blog.

As I pondered what to write this year, I perused a couple of books and ended up looking through my copy of Richard Goodman’s  “Karl Terzaghi – The Engineer as Artist”.  Among the many stories and accounts, I found this passage recounting an incident in the late 1950s (Ch. 17, pp245):

At this critical time, the world was reminded of the terrible consequences of dam failure when Board member Andre Coyne’s Malpassat Dam failed in France, causing more than 400 deaths (in Frejus, very near Ruth’s 1939 refuge on the French Riviera).  It failed on the initial filling of the reservoir due to geological weakness in one of the rock abutments of the very thin concrete arch.Later Karl would express sever criticism of the decision to bold such a structure on a geologically inadequate site.  But now he comforted his distraught colleague, writing that “failures of this kind are, unfortunately, essential and inevitable links in the chain of progress in the realm of engineering, because there are no other means for detecting the limits to the validity of our concepts and procedures…. The torments which you experienced should at least be tempered by the knowledge that the sympathies of your colleagues in the engineering profession will be coupled with their gratitude for the benefits which they have derived from your bold pioneering.”

Throughout the book, Goodman does an excellent job of showing the different facets of Terzaghi, and this is no exception.  He had a reputation of being a tough, direct, and straight-forward engineer that did not pull punches.  Here we see a somewhat softer side as he comforts a colleague, who was an expert in his own right.

If you have not read Goodman’s book, I highly recommend it for all Terzaghi fans!  It is published by ASCE and can be found through the ASCE Bookstore, or at other book retailers.  (Disclosure:  Neither DBA or any of its employees receive any commissions, compensation, or other considerations for promoting this book.)

Bridge Foundations, Miscellaneous

Leo Frigo Memorial Bridge, Wisconsin–Foundation Failure???

Picture Source: nbcchicago.com

While several of the DBA staff were at the DFI 38th Annual Conference on Deep Foundations last week, we received texts and calls from colleagues wondering if we had been called about the apparent foundation failure at the Leo Frigo Memorial Bridge in Green Bay, Wisconsin.  As of now, DBA has not been asked to be involved with the evaluation.  The Wisconsin DOT is currently investigating.  Our friend, Randy Post over at Geoprac.net has a post on the event, including a CNN video report that also recounts some other more dramatic bridge failures that were NOT due to foundation failures.

This bridge was built in 1980 and the “failure” is limited to a single pier that has subsided or settled a couple of feet in a rather sudden manner.

The Green Bay Press Gazette has this article with some video.  There is also an article noting that a petroleum pipeline is near the subject pier.

Actual failures of a foundation are rare, so if this is such a case, this will make a very interesting case history once the cause is determined.  Stay tuned for more developments.