“It's been a lot of 55- to 60-hour weeks since February of 2010,” he says. “I want to golf again.”
Getting the sequel off the ground took time. As the east/west leg was wrapping up, funding for the north/south leg was about as shaky as the political future of then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich. So the project sat on the city's design shelf for about six years.
Finally, in 2009, a multibillion-dollar state capital plan shook loose under Gov. Pat Quinn, giving Wacker II a green light. Restarting the job, which officially kicked off in April 2010, was a snap, says Daniel Burke, Chicago's chief bridge engineer.
“We had it to 80% design in 2003. It was ready to go,” he explains. Funded through state and federal dollars, the sequel turned out to be a lucky break for taxpayers. The city's original budget for the second phase, $360 million, is now dialed back to $300 million, with the work on track to wrap up at the end of 2012. All the while, Wacker has remained partially open to local pedestrian and vehicular traffic.
Burke mostly credits value engineering for the cost savings. But the industry's recession “hasn't hurt us either,” he admits.
Take, for example, the bidding war that erupted over the interchange job last year. The city estimated $100 million. A joint venture of F.H. Paschen/Cabo Construction Corp., the lowest bidder, submitted $73 million. Also vying for the job were James McHugh Construction Co., the second-lowest bidder at $78 million, and Walsh Construction Co., the highest bidder at $85 million. Walsh had previously held all three contracts on the nearly $200-million east/west rehab.
A feeding frenzy soon emerged, and contractors were pointing fingers at each other over technical flaws in their bid submittals. Rather than hold up the badly needed construction work in court, the city disqualified the bids, rebid the job and awarded it to Paschen/Cabo for $72 million (ENR 3/29/10 p. 15).
Bids have continued to come in low, and one wonders if anyone is making money on this job. “Call me in a year, and I'll answer that question,” says Mike Gould, McHugh's vice president of infrastructure. Though it lost the interchange job, McHugh nabbed a $56-million contract, a rebuild from Randolph to Adams streets that requires, in some cases, continuous deck pours up to 2,000 cu yd and transverse post-tensioning just steps away from glassed-in office lobbies.
While working flat out on that section this summer, McHugh is aiming its sights on a contract to rebuild the balance of the mainline viaduct, from Adams to Van Buren streets, which CDOT plans to advertise in August. Keeping on schedule is the program's single biggest challenge, participants say.
“We've worked enormous amounts of overtime,” says Gould. Meanwhile, Paschen's crews are busy rebuilding the Congress interchange, which will feature a new, 3.5-acre park. The half-cloverleaf off ramps, previously exposed, will now be buried. Making that new elevation possible has required re-routing a 14-ft-dia interceptor sewer through the infield of the interchange. Using a combination of cut-and-cover and tunnel-boring methods, Paschen's crews have had to drill around urban obstacles, ducking and weaving under the expressway and above a subway tunnel at the same time.
