Rain means some Highway 40 work waits until 2010
The soggy late-October weather isn’t expected to cause the reopening of Highway 40 to slide past the end-of-year deadline, said Lesley Hoffarth, project director for the Missouri Department of Transportation. But there’s a pretty good chance some work will spill over until next year.
Needless to say, the steady procession of storm fronts in recent weeks is causing its share of heartburn among highway planners.
“It does,” Hoffarth said. “I think it’s keeping us all up at night. We’ve just had so much rain. I tell you, Gateway is working awful hard to get this all open by the end of the year.”
Hoffarth said people need to understand that the stretch of Highway 40 will reopen as soon as it is ready to be driven on. But “more than likely” there will still be some leftover work to do after that.
“With all of this rain, it’s doubtful we are going to get all the grading work done, seeding, mulching,” she told Ride today. “The striping is going to be an issue. We’ll probably need to do some temporary striping, and come back . The staining of the soundwalls or concrete surfaces we haven’t gotten to.
“There will still be work we will have to do so there will be lane (closures) once we open the road.”
The concept of reopening the highway and then completing some additional work later isn’t a new one. Some work still had to be done on the western half of rebuilt Highway 40 after it reopened in late 2008.
Just get it open so we can get off these crazy congested side streets.
Of course Gateway will still get their big bonus$$$ for opening the project “ahead” of schedule when they open it in December. What a joke. Just like last time, they’ll open the highway, but then continue to close lanes at different times for months to complete signange, grading, painting and landscaping. I have no problem with them completing work after the fact to get the highway open on schedule, but I do have a BIG problem with them collecting a bonus for opening it ahead of schedule when the work isn’t DONE! Way to waste millions MODOT!
@Logic - nothing like an informed rant. My understanding is that there is no bonus for opening early, just penalties for opening late… (per this week’s I64 chat on stltoday.com)
@Logic-
So because we had one of the wettest Octobers on record, you want to deny Gateway the money they’ve earned? If we hadn’t had so much rain, the highway would have probably been open for driving by Thanksgiving and a lot of the secondary work would’ve been done by the end of the year. The problem is that they need milder temperatures (i.e. fall weather) and dry weather to do a lot of these tasks. They can’t paint or do landscaping if the rain is just going to wash it away. They can’t stripe in December because the tape won’t stick if the temperatures are much below 50. The temporary striping sucks, but if you need dry weather with above freezing temps, it had to be done in October.
In addition, the contract only stipulates that the driving surface is open by the end of the year. They have until sometime next year (I believe until early summer) to finish any secondary work, which can involve limited night-time lane closures.
Gateway and MODOT have done a fantastic job with this project. Two years of headaches will earn us decades of use, especially when 70 and 44 are in bad shape and will need major work in the next couple of decades. Give Gateway the bonus money and my appreciation for a job well done.
@dhoefgen
From the chat on 10/21:
Ross H: What date are you projecting to open up the eastern half of I-64? Also, I was under the impression that Gateway would receive a bonus for each day that they finish ahead of schedule. However, a person I work with said that this is not the case, and that Gateway will receive a single lump-sum bonus if they finish ahead of schedule, regardless if it is 1 day or 30 days. Which is correct?
Thank you,
Ross
Dan Galvin and Linda Wilson: Gateway gets a bonus if the road is open to traffic by December 31, 2009. That’s it. Now if the road is NOT open starting January 1, 2010, the contractor has to pay $24,000 per day every day until they open it. But there are no extra bonuses for every day before December 31, 2009 that they open it.
Linda Wilson
So they get a set bonus for finishing by December 31. The bonus is the same whether they open it on December 31 or Decemeber 1. However, if they go late, then they lose the bonus and have to pay a per-day penalty.
@adam - I’m not saying deny them the money they’ve earned, they will get every bit of what was negotiated into their contract, what they should not receive is a bonus for opening a highway on time, only to have to close it later (after collecting their bonus of course), to finish the job. Weather delays and the like are taken into account when bidding construction work, it’s just a fact of life that it’s going to rain, how much only Dave Murray knows! Gateway will get paid, I just disagree on them collecting their bonus if the job isn’t done and they have to go back in and close stuff down to finish it later. On the other side, Gateway has done a great job on this project and the Design-Build project went smoothly. Congrats on that.
From an economic viewpoint, it is likely cheaper to open it early and pay a bonus to Gateway than it is to limit economic growth by keeping it closed until it is absolutely finished. There is certainly a tradeoff to the approach MoDOT took with this project, but once the road was closed, the clock began ticking on economic losses. Get the road open, and deal with the finishing touches later.
What, you mean its not open? I guess those cones and fences are up for a reason, eh?
Nice highway, and nobody’s on it!
JK
The people who post comments about what a great job that’s been done on this project must be associated in some way with the contractor. Thus far the project has cost countless millions in wasted gas, lost time, and economic dislocation to affected families, commuters and businesses. When finished, it won’t get any of us anywhere any faster than before the work started. To be sure, the useful life of the road has been extended and the safety of some interchanges has (we hope) been improved. At the same time, however, there has been significant wear and tear on the alternatve routes, reducing their useful lives, and few days pass when I don’t see or read about an accident related to excessive congestion on one of the alternate routes. The day may come when we can see whether the project has yielded a net benefit for the area, but that day is most assuredly not here yet. At a minimum, we should reserve judgment until the highway is reopend and we can actually use it. Right now it’s just a useless ribbon of concrete we stare at while trapped in traffic. By what measure can we call this job “fantastic”?
Well HarvardLaw, I’ve dealt with enough mindless lawyers to know that they don’t know the first thing about construction, and that getting a half billion dollar road project open in under 2 years is a pretty bid deal.