Six months, $20 million

NEW ALBANY — It likely will take six months and $20 million before the Sherman Minton Bridge is reopened, officials said Friday.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, along with federal and local officials, presented the plan and timeline that will allow the Sherman Minton Bridge, connecting Louisville to New Albany, to reopen. The bridge has been shut down since Sept. 9 when a critical crack was discovered in a load-bearing beam.

Since the bridges closure, engineers, state transportation officials, federal transportation officials and state and local representatives have been visiting the bridge and working on a solution to get the span reopened to traffic.

But the public will have to wait, possibly until the end of March to be able to use the bridge.

“We were facing a very big crisis in this whole area,” Beshear said. “We have a solution, we defined the problem and while we would love to stand here and say we can open this bridge next week — because we know what a disruption this has been to people’s lives and to the commerce in this area — at least we’re now starting to put our arms around some definitive timelines and some definitive cost that we think are fairly decent estimates at the moment.”

Officials said that everything will be done to speed up repairs and bids from contractors are expected to be opened in mid-October. The completion timeline also will be weather-dependent.

Construction costs

Daniels said Indiana will start welcoming bids Monday, and 17 contractors already have expressed an interest in competing for the project.

“We expect this to take, and this is only an estimate, six months,” he said. “It could be more, it could be less. We expect it to cost in the vicinity of $20 million. It could be more, it could be less,”

And to whomever the contract is awarded, there will be an incentive to beat the six-month timeline.

“The contract that is let will include an incentive clause for speed and the contractor will be able to earn up to $5 million, at $100,000 a day, for beating the timetable,” Daniels said.

He added the $5 million incentive has already been built into the $20 million estimate for the project.

Although Indiana has the lead in maintaining the bridge, the governors said the costs to repair the span will be shared equally.

For Kentucky, Beshear said the funding will come out of the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s budget.

“We’ll find the money one way or another. Obviously, we have other uses for that money and the more money we have to pull off of other things ... [they] will slow down to some degree,” he said. “But this is a top priority, this is a crisis, this is an emergency and this moves to the top of the list in both in Indiana and Kentucky.”

For Indiana, Daniels said the state has the funds to cover the repairs, but was not sure exactly what fund the money will come out of to pay its portion of the costs.

“I don’t know what account they’ll write the check out of ... [but] because of the Major Moves transaction, Indiana has a tremendous amount of money we’ve been reinvesting, so when something like this comes up, we don’t have to hesitate,” he said. “I don’t want to minimize [the cost, but] in Indiana’s transportation situation, that’s pocket change.”

And Federal Highway Administrator Victor Mendez offered the states some additional help.

“We are bringing additional federal resources to the project,” he said. “Up to 25 percent of today’s estimate, the $20 million you are hearing about, we will find additional federal resources because a new fiscal year is beginning tomorrow.”

He explained that the Federal Highway administration had been given a six-month extension in its funding for federal transportation projects and the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1. The extension and new fiscal year allowed the Federal Highway Administration to set aside the funds to repair the Sherman Minton Bridge.

“Regardless of whether we got federal money, we were going to have to repair this bridge,” Beshear said. “There wasn’t any question about that.”

And to date, for the inspection, repairs already completed and engineering work, the states have spent between $6 million and $7 million.

“I believe we have the best solution that we can come to today, given everything we have in place,” Mendez said. “We’re going to open up this bridge as soon as we can and we’re going to do it safely.”

Repair details

The plan to repair the bridge that was devised is to add modern steel plating to the bridge’s ties over the length of the entire structure.

Anne Rearick, director of bridges for the Indiana Department of Transportation, said bolting the steel plating to the bridge’s existing ties will serve as a structural backup, and allows load transfer to the tie if anything would happen to the bridge.

“The plates carry the load instead of the tie, so you eliminate the concern of a fracture,” she said.

Once the repairs are complete, the lifespan of the Sherman Minton Bridge is expected to be extended to the total design life for a bridge that would be built today.

“We’ll get 20 to 25 years life out of it,” Rearick said.

And at a cost of $20 million, the repairs are a fraction of the $160 million to $250 million range she said it would cost to fully replace the Intestate 64 span.

Before the steel plating is added to the bridge ties, crews will repair all of the deficiencies in the bridge and the bridge welds.

“We’ll have a redundant, and from every account I’ve been given, a stronger facility than ... we started with,” Daniels said. “They did find additional weaknesses, some minor, some more [significant], that led to the decision to not only fix every single one of those, but to this total reinforcement end-to-end.”

He added that there was some sort of weakness discovered in about 40 percent of the welds on the bridge.

“Short of a complete replacement, this is just about as forceful an answer as is available,” Daniels said.

Economic impact

For each day the bridge is closed, it continues to have a detrimental effect on the community.

“Here, as much as any project we’ve dealt with, every day matters,” Daniels said. “Because every day the bridge is not open, people are wasting time and money. There’s nothing we can do [that will be] more effective than taking days off the calendar in terms of getting traffic flowing once again.”

Kerry Stemler, Louisville and Southern Indiana Bridges Authority co-chair and Southern Indiana business owner, said the closure of the Sherman Minton Bridge has had a negative effect on his business.

“It has been damaging,” he said. “I am someone who depends on cross-river mobility.”

Stemler, who is the president of KM Stemler Co. Inc., a commercial and industrial general contracting firm, and KM Stemler Trucking Inc., a specialized interstate hauling company, said he is not the only one that has been affected in the area.

“People have gotten laid-off of their jobs in our community because of this problem,” he said.

Louis Schmitt, president of Schmitt Furniture in downtown New Albany, said it is too early to tell how the closure will affect his business. He said the busy season for his company does not start until mid-October and runs until about March — about the same amount of time that repairs are expected to take on the Sherman Minton Bridge.

Despite the closure, Schmitt said business has been comparable to last year.

“We’re still seeing a lot of Louisville business coming in,” he said.

Schmitt added that fewer customers are coming in during rush hour, instead waiting until off-peak hours.

“We’ve seen a little bit of an uptick in our traffic over the weekend,” he said. “It seems out-of-town shoppers come in more on the weekends. Our sales have not been off too much.”

While Stemler pointed out that the Sherman Minton Bridge repairs and the Ohio River Bridges Project are two completely separate projects, he said the closure of the bridge has pointed to the need for more capacity across the Ohio River.

“It just really intensified what we were doing,” he said. “That river is a geographical boundary. Without cross-river mobility, it became an economic boundary. It should not have done that.”

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