Halfway to the Home Stretch

Tucson’s Interstate 10 Widening Accelerates Forward

By Alan M. Petrillo

Just as Tucson's residents are acclimating to detours, the $200 million I-10 widening project reached the halfway milestone.

The Interstate 10 widening project, a $200 million, 3.5-year reconstruction and renovation of the freeway flowing through the heart of Tucson, has passed the halfway point and continues on schedule and on budget.

The I-10 Widening project is on track for a spring 2010 completion. (Photo courtesy Kiewit/ADOT)

Linda Ritter, public information officer for the Arizona Department of Transportation, says the widening is the largest single highway transportation project in the state's history and will expand the highway from six to eight lanes between Prince Road and 29th Street.

In the process, the project will build seven new bridges and underpasses at Grant Road, Speedway Blvd., St. Mary’s Road, Congress Street, Clark Street, 18th Street and 22nd Street.

Rod Lane, senior resident engineer for ADOT, says part of the design concept meant raising the roadway because the new bridges are higher - 17 ft compared to 14 ft, plus or minus a few inches. And because the new bridges have been built at maximum span to allow for future expansion, they require a deeper beam.

“Typically, the freeway is now raised about 5 ft higher along the southern end of the construction, but not so much on the northern end because the bridges are farther apart,” Lane says.

Lane says that the Miracle Mile bridge north of Prince Road didn’t have to be touched because it had previously been constructed with the ultimate design of the roadway in mind.

The I-10 project is so large an undertaking that massive amounts of material must be moved and replaced, Lane says. For example, a total of 68,000 cu ft of Portland cement concrete pavement will be going down on the roadways. Underneath that will be 42,000 tons of base asphalt.

The roadway excavation was a major undertaking, with 231,000 cu yds of material being moved, Lane says.

“That’s a big hill,” he adds.

Another 588,000 cu yds of material, using fill coming from the roadway excavation, is going into the embankments.

A major hurdle faced by crews was allowing the major cross-streets a freer flow of traffic during the construction period, says Jody Schott, project manager for Kiewit-Sundt joint venture, the general contractor. Kiewit-Sundt was formed by the Phoenix office of Kiewit, which has the majority stake in the venture, and the Tempe, Ariz. office of Sundt Construction.

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“The cross-street traffic was a big deal and originally we were going to go to one lane in each direction,” Schott says. “But we found that plan wouldn’t allow the traffic capacity we wanted, so instead of a static traffic control setup we’ve done a lot more work by moving traffic through during the day and doing night and weekend closures of some of those streets. That’s been a big challenge and we’ve been successful with it.”

Besides traffic capacity, Tucson has a lot going on during the year, especially in the winter months, Schott adds.

“We got caught a little off-guard with the Gem and Mineral Show and also the PGA golf tournament,” he says. “We had no idea how big the Gem and Mineral Show was, but we were able to work around the traffic and not interfere with the show by shifting some work from days to nights.”

During the golf tournament, “pretty much everything stopped,” Schott says. “We had to remove some concrete barriers and barricades and shut the project down, but everyone on the job handled it well.”

Schott says the project has a lot of architectural work in the concrete - on cast-in-place walls, bridge columns and abutment walls - making it challenging to have all the artwork blend perfectly.

“A lot of time and effort is going into that artwork,” he says. “Originally, we were doing fabrication for the artwork in the field, but changed to a central location, which helped us be more successful. We have rubber form liner shapes made off-site and shipped here, where we pour a sample of each form and provide it to the architect. There have only been a couple of modifications that way.”

Bob Brittain, vice president of HDR Engineering in Tucson, says his firm designed two of the three sections of the project - the northern section from Prince Road to Grant Road and the southern one from Congress Street to 29th Street.

Parsons Brinkerhoff of Tucson designed the middle section.

“Our biggest challenge was how to maintain the traffic while providing space to build the new part of the road,” Brittain says. “We were completely trashing the old highway and building a new one.”

Complicating the design was the necessity to rebuild all the bridges on a longer span, making them deeper and raising the roadway.

“The bridge reconstruction has gone very well,” Brittain says. “Contractors have asked us to design a couple of detours to allow them more space on the project, especially in the Interstate 19 area.”

Seven new bridges are being built as part of the I-10 Widening project in Tucson. Each bridge is being built to allow for future expansion. (Photo courtesy Kiewit/ADOT)

Brittain says the traffic switchover was completed in May, putting two westbound and two eastbound lanes between Prince Road and St. Mary’s Road on the new concrete pavement.

“That was originally scheduled to be done in September and the crew was able to accomplish it in May,” he adds.

Brittain says the construction team is happy with how smoothly the traffic has been moving on the frontage roads, which were reconfigured to three lanes in each direction.

“The fears were that the business driveways would be gridlocked, but many of the businesses have told us the traffic moves well and they like the drop-in business from the higher volume,” he adds.

Key Players
Owner: Arizona Dept. of Transportation
Design: HDR Engineering; PB
General Contractor: Kiewit-Sundt joint venture
Subcontractors/Suppliers: A-Core; Bob's Barricades; Case Foundation; Cemex; Rinker Materials; RMI; Combs Construction; Consolidated Rebar; Contractors West; E.R. Hawkins; Tpac; Schnabel Foundation

Useful Sources

For more project information, visit the ADOT website at www.i10tucsondistrict.com/29toP.html

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