PITTSBURGH — As of Monday morning, the latest phase of the Commercial Street Bridge project is ahead of schedule, according to PennDOT officials, who are eyeing an early opening of the Parkway East before the anticipated date of Monday, August 3. But PennDOT District Executive Jason Zang said his team cannot make any promises.
“Best I can tell you right now […] maybe the middle of next week, plus or minus,” Zang said. “A little bit of that depends on the weather – looks like tomorrow is going to be a bad weather day for us. We can’t place concrete, certainly can’t do that overlay on the bridge in the rain, but we’re going to keep an eye on that. No promises just yet, but yeah, we are tracking a little bit early right now.”
Timelapse video from Channel 11 photographers shows the lateral slide of the new Commercial Street Bridge, which started around 10:30 Sunday morning. Zang said it went better than expected.
“Yesterday was a wildly successful day for us,” Zang said. “We moved it 96 feet in about 7 hours, so if you do the math, that’s 13.7 feet per hour.”
Zang said crews were expected to move the bridge six more feet late Monday morning into the early afternoon. He said the highest bridge bearing would be in place once the bridge was moved. Crews will also set and grout anchor bolts as they complete the careful process of placing the bridge exactly where engineers need it to be.
“We’ve built that bridge on temporary foundations and so all the stresses of a bridge are built into that structure in the deck itself. So when we get to that final location, we want to match that,” said John Myler, PennDOT senior assistant construction manager.
Myler described the biggest challenge they faced sliding the massive bridge, calling the MAMOOT system “an engineering marvel.”
“When you have something this large of a structure, 22 million pounds, the engineering behind lifting something of that scale in and of itself is just a lot, but then when you talk about trying to move it sideways, that’s something we’re traditionally not used to doing,” Myler said.
PennDOT officials said they will know more as the week goes on and will keep everyone updated.
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