Marie Bridge Alternate Design
Location: Kings County, PEI
Client: Highfield Construction
Duration: 2013
Approximate Value: $1.6 M
Key Staff: Greg MacDonald, Stephen O’Brien
Project Description
The Marie Bridge, located in King’s County Prince Edward Island, is a bridge situated over a small watercourse feeding the St. Peter’s Bay. The bridge is a single span structure of approximately 28 meters. The original design of the replacement structure required a phased construction process with the north half of the structure replaced first (with traffic maintained on the south half) and then traffic moved to the north half while the south half was replaced. The bridge was to incorporate a cast-in-place deck on pre-stressed concrete girders (supplied by the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal) and semi-integral abutments founded on end bearing piles.
Harbourside’s Role
Working with Highfield Construction, Harbourside Engineering Consultants (HEC) produced an alternate design for the new structure featuring integral abutments, reducing the total piling requirements by half. Also, in order to eliminate the time-consuming phasing of the works, HEC designed a temporary detour bridge utilizing timber materials available through the TIR supply yard and detailed the detour alignment around the site. This enabled the work on the replacement structure to proceed without interference from traffic.
Harbourside’s value engineering solution allowed the contractor to pay for Harbourside’s services and split the savings the alternative solution create with PEITIR.
Unique Challenges
The major challenge with this project was the schedule. This project was awarded for construction with a tight schedule prior to the acceptance of our value engineering alternative. Due to this, the temporary bridge design and new bridge design work had to be quickly advanced in parallel to meet the overall schedule of the project. This required multiple Harbourside staff to work together to ensure the Contractor could order materials and complete the construction work on time and budget.
Social Impact
Harbourside used strong engineering principals to help the Contractor create savings for the Province of Prince Edward Island. With limited funding for infrastructure, projects that go significantly over budget can get cancelled. Our value engineering solution creating savings for the province and helped ensure the project was approved for construction.