Dan's Papers - May 6, 2008 - Saving $45 Million

I am sure that every one of us by now has driven along County Road 39, the former great traffic jam of the Hamptons, and marveled at how now with its five lanes everything is just moving smartly along, and how fast they got the whole thing done.

I think, though, there is a great back story to this County project that ought to be told. It involves Steve Levy, the County executive, four or five engineers at the Department of Public Works, and a big gamble that they were all willing to take.

In 2005, plans to reconfigure County Road 39 were put forward by the Federal Government. The Feds would condemn property on both sides of the road, knock down the bridge on County Road 39 where that road passes over St. Andrews Road just to the east of the college, rebuild it bigger and broader with all the traffic detoured around it for about half a year, and then finish up with a total cost of $50 million, much of which the Feds would pay under the Federal Road Improvement Law.

Steve Levy, to his great credit, considered that this would be a great upheaval that would result in a massive loss of business for at least one summer season, not only along the road but everywhere in the Hamptons, and that it was a hell of a lot of money. He thought, and he was familiar with County road building costs, that this project could be done for a quarter of that if his people did it. Of course, if his people did it there would be no federal money available.

"If we failed," he told me the other day, "we failed. I saw it as a risk."

Levy is known among County workers for his very penny pinching style, which is designed so that the taxpayers get the biggest bang for their buck.

The reason Levy thought he could get it done without all this disruption and expense was because he would have it done without doing all the condemnation of the property along the way to make County Road 39 wider.

"We did the math. You could do five lanes in the existing right of way. I never did understand why the Feds have to have things so wide when they get involved."

I then told him something he didn't know.

"The Federal program goes back to the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s," I told him. "Congress passed a law mandating the construction of Federal highways and bridges all around the country that would be wide enough to get our troops and tanks to every part of the country in a hurry in case of invasion. This was during the Cold War, at a time the government felt that a Soviet invasion might be very real. Anyway, as a result of that, we have the Interstate Highway System. And we have very wide bridges where the Feds come in. They have to be wide enough and strong enough to support a division of tanks."

"How do you know this?" he asked.

I told him that about 20 years ago, the Feds came in and said that the narrow little bridge that crosses Sagg Pond in Bridgehampton was in need of replacement. It had cracks and pieces of concrete falling off. They proposed a four-lane bridge there. And the people went nuts. This is a historic bridge, they said. It needs to be just two little lanes wide with the people fishing off it. Committees were formed. I recall that painter Robert Dash displayed a painting he did of the old bridge. The Feds backed down. And we got a new bridge just like the old one.

"So County Road 39 would be wide enough for TANKS? Mind if I use that?"

The Suffolk County Department of Public Works proposed a plan that would cost just $10 million, provided they could find another way to build the bridge over St. Andrews Road.

Either you tear it down and there are detours for six months, or you find a way to build a new and wider bridge there - not so wide as the Federal bridge but still wider than what was there now - without having to tear it down. And they had a plan.

It had all come about because of the annual seminar held that year in Syracuse for the New York State Public Works commissioners and engineers. It's been said later that it was a lucky thing that Levy didn't pull the plug on that annual seminar trip. His people went.

Specifically, Tom Rogers, who is now the Chief of the Engineering Department, and Engineer Bob Whelan went. And among other things, they saw a PowerPoint presentation made by the Contech Corporation about a new prefab reinforced concrete unit that could be used to build bridges over streams and narrow rivers.

These prefab units were four feet wide and up to 60 feet long. They were in the shape of giant office staples. There were the two piers on the sides, four feet wide, and then there was the flat top of it four feet wide and up to 60 feet across. The underside of that top was in the shape of an arch. It was strong enough to hold up a 747 going over it. And the PowerPoint people showed a photograph of just that.

The way to build a bridge, the people from Contech said, was by either tearing down an old bridge and dropping these four-foot sections down by crane, or just doing exactly that at a spot where there never was a bridge. These four-foot sections were not long enough across the top if the bridge had to be as wide as the Feds wanted. But they could be built as wide as the County wanted. Still, it involved a total replacement of the existing bridge and that meant the six months of detours.

Back at their headquarters in Islip, these men met with two other county engineers named Bill Tillman and Jim Peterman. They were just sitting around in the coffee shop in the building when one of them began to write things down on a napkin.

What if, he wondered, we don't drop down these four-foot sections by crane, but instead we go down below onto St. Andrews Road and slide them in under the existing bridge?

A light bulb went off. And everybody knew where this was going. Slide these precast things under there, and then remove the cracked, old concrete bridge span on top by jackhammer bit by bit in four-foot chunks, replace them with fresh concrete and then do a new asphalt top. You could do this lane by lane. Just slide in the unit below and you'd do four more feet. You'd never have to have more than one lane closed at any time. There might be a slowdown. But there would be no detour whatsoever.

And then they all ran down to get the plans of the distance from St. Andrews Road to the underside of the bridge. And when they saw that it was 17 feet they let out a whoop. The precasts would lower that to 15 feet. So what! There was still plenty of headroom for the biggest of trucks. It would work.

So that is what they did. It did take almost six months to do this because they still had to completely replace the old bridge. But doing it underneath in four-foot sections bit by bit was barely noticed.

And so the whole project was essentially finished by April 15 by the construction company Rosemar Construction, who bid the contract in at $12 million.

I was curious about something, so I asked Levy.

"Didn't you have in the plan that this had to be completed by Memorial Day? It was completed by April first. They worked overtime?"

"They had an incentive. For every day before Memorial Day weekend that they could finish the project, they would get an extra $25,000."

Levy waited while I did the math. Two months early meant a bonus of $1.5 million. So they got $13.5 million instead of $12 million. Big deal. They had done it within budget with no detours, no disruption, and with a whole new process. And it didn't cost $50 million.

I told you this story was worth telling.

Also, it put me in mind of an engineering class I took when I was in grad school at Harvard studying to become an architect years ago. Our teacher was a Mr. Mitchell. And he told us this story about tension and compression and torque, which, when we got out into the world, we would have to calculate correctly to keep things from falling down.

"One time," he said, "I engineered a bridge that got built over the Mystic River in Newton. It was only about 300 yards across. Pretty easy. I figured the weight of a full traffic jam of trucks filled to the brim, and then figured loads that could hold up to 15 times that, the standard multiple.

"One day, after it was built, I saw a picture on the front page of a local weekly paper that made me run out to my car and drive down to that bridge to watch it fall down. The picture showed the county dredge. One steel arm was wrapped around one of the pillars of the bridge. The other steel arm was out in front of the dredge, pulling in hunks of mud and rock from the river bottom to make a deeper channel. I had never figured on this, on this sideways stress.

"Fortunately, when I got there, the bridge was still standing. And the moral is - God is on the side of erring engineers."