Marsh Creek Road Bridge Replacement

Modernizing Obsolete Infrastructure – when Structures meets Environment

This project, approximately 5 miles east of Clayton, CA, consisted of a constructing a new 91 ft long new California Bulb-Tee Girder bridge replacing the old bridge spanning over Marsh Creek that was deemed “Geometrically Intolerable”. Project Elements included: temporary stream diversion, drilling and installing soldier-pile wall, soil nail wall shoring, roadway and channel excavation, rock slope protection, concrete bridge approach slab, Type 742 concrete barriers, tubular hand-railing, aggregate base, Hot Mix Asphalt, cold-planing AC, signing, striping, drainage, fencing, and MBGR.
Interesting Facts about MCB:

• COST: $4.9 million
• FIRST WORKING DAY: April 30, 2018
• SUBSTANTIAL COMPLETION: January 4, 2019
• COMPLETION DATE: February 2019
• The bridge consisted of six – 4ft wide by 4ft deep by 88’9” long California Bulb Tee girders weighing.
  87,100 lbs each and had to be delivered on independent special permit P-9 trucks and a designated special permit route from the casting facility in Lathrop (Confab).
• The Stage 2 girders (Total 4) were placed utilizing two 265 ton telescoping crane in three hours, taking approximately 30 minutes per girder (subtracting setup time) and delaying traffic for less than 15 minutes at a time.
• The use of high early strength concrete mixes were employed, some reaching 4,200 psi in 3 days.

“This $5 million dollar project had significant complexities on a small footprint – accelerated project delivery, multi-stage bridge construction over environmentally sensitive Marsh Creek, limited access and laydown areas, multi-stage traffic control over busy Marsh Creek Rd, complex temporary shoring, local opposition, in-creek permit restrictions, soil stockpile management, and significant exposure to wildlife. It had all the challenges of a $30 million dollar bridge replacement project over a waterway.” – Sunny Jhutti, PE, SE – Substrate, Inc

Substrate (Prime CM Consultant) provided comprehensive construction management services for the award-winning Marsh Creek Road Bridge Replacement for Contra Costa County. Substrate provided the Resident Engineer/Structure’s Representative (Sunny Jhutti) and oversaw the entire project from pre-construction to post-construction and successful Caltrans Audit.

Value Added to the Client

The project team employed various innovative methods to help accelerate the project such as using high-early strength concrete, deleting an entire stage of construction by over building the previous stage, utilizing soil-cement backfill, and reducing the closure pour settlement time from 60 days to 15 days – all of this required a willingness to participate and being flexible by both the designer – Mark Thomas, and the contractor – Bridgeway. The result was that this project that was originally intended to be a two-season project, was completed in one construction season. This project won the 2019 APWA Project of the Year Award in the $5 million dollar category. This completion of the project avoid costly winterization, which save hundreds of thousands of dollars and one year off the schedule.

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