CAPE BRIDGE MAKING CONCRETE HISTORY

It took drivers from two Cape Girardeau concrete suppliers roughly 350 trips across the Mississippi River Saturday to supply just half of the concrete needed for the largest structural pour in Missouri history.

Crews at Delta Concrete and McDonald Co. began mixing concrete at 6 a.m. Saturday in preparation for a 48-hour pour for the foundation of one of two main towers for the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge.

Workers will continue on 12-hour shifts today to supply a total of 19 million pounds of concrete for the project. Delta Concrete batch man Ken Kelley said the bridge pour far exceeds any project he has completed in the past three years.

"This is the most expensive, longest pour we've ever done," he said. "Typically we see 15 to 20 hours at a maximum."

Drivers are using 18 drum trucks to haul concrete across the river to barges waiting near the Illinois bridge approach. Each truck carries between 7 and 9 cubic yards of concrete.

The trucks dump their loads into large metal canisters on barges. The barges are pushed to a work platform in the middle of the river, and workers dump the canisters into a caisson that sits on bedrock at the bottom of the river.

Project supervisors said concrete was poured at a rate of about 100 cubic feet -- that's about 748 gallons -- per hour Saturday afternoon. They hoped to nearly double the pour rate before the project ended.

"Our early crews got the hang of things, got the kinks worked out, and now things seem to be progressing a little faster," said Kelley.

Contractors normally don't work on weekends. The project originally was scheduled to begin about midweek, but state officials and contractors moved the project up after receiving high river stage projections. Rising waters can make navigating barges or otherwise working on the river tricky, said senior construction inspector Rick Lamb.

"It was either now or maybe we'd have to wait another three or four weeks," he said.

Suppliers said they had to scramble to get full crews prepared for the massive job, but the work will pay off because their regular business won't be interrupted next week.

"It makes for a long day, but it's neat to be involved with it," said Clifton Allee with McDonald Co. "Knowing exactly how fast the pour will go or how slow the pour will go is a little bit of a challenge, since you can't just have the concrete waiting around any length of time."

The concrete pour originally was scheduled for completion four years earlier. Construction was delayed after fissures in the bedrock were discovered and the contractor pulled out of the job.

The new bridge is expected to be completed in June 2003 at a total cost of over $100 million. When it's finished, Cape Girardeau will be served by a four-lane Missouri highway linking Interstate 55 to the new four-lane bridge. On the Illinois side the roadway will narrow to two lanes.

The bridge will be the first in the Midwest to include sensitive state-of-the-art equipment designed to measure the impact of earthquakes. It will be the first cable-stay span to be outfitted with such equipment.

The bridge is named for Bill Emerson, a U.S. Representative for the 8th Congressional District of Missouri, who died in June 1996.

MoDOT will demolish the current two-lane bridge that was built in 1927.