Center St Bridge Seismic runs into Roadblock, now Split into Two Projects, One Unfunded: At MWACT

Even from beyond the grave, the SRC continues with tricks instead of treats.

At the August meeting of our Area Commission on Transportation, a tri-county board advisory to the Oregon Transportation Commission, ODOT gave an update on the Center Street seismic retrofit, the sensible project arising from the SRC wreckage. There had been no presentation or other information in the meeting packet, so at that time there was nothing to say. The meeting minutes suggest a reason there was no presentation included! The news is kinda bad.

August minutes in November packet

ODOT's formal engineering study for the project identified six distinct areas for work and a separate subproject for each.

About the "West Approach" and "West Ramp," ODOT says they "are not practical for retrofit due to poor soil....the cost to retrofit the west side of the bridge is almost as much as replacing and there are no additional funds for either." Seismic work on the west side will therefore have to be "a new project that could move forward independent of the current retrofit project."

So even when the $100 million retrofit is "complete," the west side connections will not be stabilized and will still be vulnerable.

Ultimately this is not wholly surprising.

SRC Geological Addendum, Sept. 2016
(inset detail added)

On the "liquefaction hazard map" in the "Salem River Crossing Project Geological Resources Technical Report Addendum" of September 2016, the soils around the west side approaches are on "category 4" of 5, and surrounded by "category 3" soils. That's bad.

Of course, the preferred alternative would have gone over a much larger extent of category 4 soils and included a substantial area of category 5 soil. That's worse.

We are lucky the east side of the Center Street Bridge is not so problematic!

This is another indication of how badly ODOT and the City of Salem were low-balling the cost estimates.

And with the retrofit's cost escalation, just imagine how much the SRC would have escalated. (And of course we see this on the Columbia River Crossing and the I-5 Rose Quarter messes.)

This is just more evidence that ODOT's cost estimating on very large projects cannot be trusted.

Work plan interest areas in August minutes

Also in the August minutes, there were notes on the work plan that is in progress. In a general way the "interest areas" mostly sound good. Here are half of them:

• Transit
• Safety
• Equity
• Climate and Emissions

What's not to like?

But in the November materials, when they get to "climate and emissions," it's clear they don't view working on climate as a valuable end in and of itself. They view "climate" instrumentally, as rhetorical framing and greenwash to secure funding and to pursue other ends and business-as-usual.

Climate work is not an end in itself,
but is instrumentally useful for other ends

The draft list of priority projects also doesn't much correspond with that list of "interest areas" from August. It's mostly highway expansion and oriented to driving.

Mostly highway projects and
doesn't correspond much to August list

The ACT continues to look backwards to 20th century custom and practice.

Seattle Times and Washington Post, this week

The Mid-Willamette Valley Area Commission on Transportation meets Thursday the 2nd at 3:30pm. Meeting information, agenda, and packet are here.

Previous notes on the seismic project here.

Addendum, November 1st

Now the MPO has announced a TIP amendment for the seismic project.

Part of the TIP amendment package

It's odd. It says "Move $3 million of HB2017 discretionary funds from the construction phase to the preliminary engineering phase. Add three bridge locations to reflect full project scope."

But they are not clear at all that some of those new bridge locations are now excluded. Z4 and Z5 (West ramp and East northbound ramp) are not part of the funded project now. Only Z6 (East southbound ramp) is both a new location and part of the funded retrofit. The "full project scope" is a very misleading turn of phrase here!