Houston Chronicle by Dug Begley 6/21/2018
The biggest public works project in Harris County history is stuck in the mud — and that’s a good thing.
Crews are tying steel and drilling deep into the mud along the Houston Ship Channel — among the first steps of significant work to replace the bridge carrying the Sam Houston Tollway across the ship channel.
When finished in the middle of the next decade, the bridge project will give drivers twice as many lanes, four in each direction, along with shoulders and a more gradual climb than the steep grade that anyone driving behind a heavy truck knows can be slow-going.
“It’s one of the county’s great needs,†Commissioner Jack Morman said during a recent, soggy tour of the site where crews are planning for the massive foundations.
Work started along the ship channel’s shoreline in April, but has ramped up recently as crews assembled the massive cranes that commuters will see for the new few years.
At roughly $1 billion, paid for via toll revenues, it is also county government’s most expensive single project in history. Morman said approving the expensive contract didn’t give him any concern, however.
“It kind of put things in perspective, but no, I wasn’t worried,†he said, noting the explosive growth of the region and the need to make the tollway four lanes in each direction throughout Harris County.
About 60,000 vehicles cross the bridge daily. With a huge jump in truck traffic and commuters, officials expect that number to swell to 158,000 vehicles a day by 2035.
The project launches with a long list of superlatives and a slight change from early descriptions. Plans call for replacing the Ship Channel Bridge with two one-way bridges of four lanes each. The twin spans will be side-by-side and connected at key points, such as at the two massive towers that hold all of the cables related to the cable-stay design.
The towers will be among the tallest structures in the region, slightly taller than downtown’s Market Square Tower and slightly shorter than the Penzoil Place twin skyscrapers. The distance between the main towers, 1,320 feet, will make the bridges the sixth-longest main spans in the nation and second-longest in Texas, behind the new Harbor Bridge in Corpus Christi set to open in 2020.
Ship Channel Constructors, a joint venture of Traylor Bros. and Zachry Construction Corp., won the $962 million construction job. The cable-stay spans were designed by the Dallas office of Figg Bridge Group.
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https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Toll-officials-giddy-over-big-plans-for-Ship-13010242.php
