Arup Hired To Fix HNTB-Designed Footbridge In Brooklyn

By summer, Arup is expected to present a design plan that addresses the unexpected amount of bouncing experienced by pedestrians crossing an HNTB-designed bridge in Brooklyn.

On Jan. 21, the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corp. filed a lawsuit against HNTB in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, stating, “Subsequent review has shown that the design for the bridge was inherently flawed.”

The $3.9-million, 450-ft-long Squibb Park Bridge, which zigzags between Brooklyn Heights and Brooklyn Bridge Park, opened in March 2013 and was designed to bounce mildly. The website for the bridge states: “Walk across the award-winning Squibb Park Bridge and you may notice a little spring in your step. That’s because it was designed to be lightweight and flexible like the trail bridges in our state and national parks.”

But residents began complaining that, over time, the bounciness grew. The bridge was closed in late 2014.

The underslung suspension pedestrian bridge marries environmentally friendly black-locust timber with draped steel-cable supports. After 16 months of working with HNTB to identify the flaw’s cause and collaborate on a solution for the bridge, Brooklyn Bridge Park officials filed the lawsuit, seeking at least $3 million in compensation.

Ted Zoli, HNTB’s national chief bridge engineer, declined to comment, as did HNTB.

Arup was on the design team responsible for the steel suspension Millennium Bridge in London that was shut down after dramatic swaying alarmed users on its opening day, in June 2000 (ENR 7/10/14 p. 14). It took some 100 tonnes of dampers and several million dollars of work to steady the bridge.

Aileen Cho, ENR's senior transportation editor, is a native of Los Angeles and recovering New Yorker. She studied English and theater at Occidental College, where a reporter teaching the one existing journalism course encouraged her to apply for the LA Times Minority Editing Training Program. Her journalism training led to her first stories about transportation, working as a cub reporter with the Greenwich Time. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. Many of her experiences with engineers and contractors have inspired material for her alternative theater productions way, way off Broadway. For ENR, Aileen has traveled the world, clambering over bridges in China, touring an airport in Abu Dhabi and descending into dark subway tunnels in New York City. She is a regular at transportation conferences, where she finds that airport and mass transit engineers really know how to have fun. Aileen is always eager to hop on another flight because there are so many interesting projects and people, and she gets tired of throwing her cats off her computer in her home office in Long Beach, California. She is a very conflicted Mets/Dodgers fan.

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