Owner/Client
Matt Winters Excavation, LLC
Portage County
Location
Portage County, OH
CEC Services
- Roadway Design
- Slope Stability/Retaining Structure Design
- Design/Build Services
- Bridge Engineering
Owner Objective
The Portage County Engineer’s office is responsible for maintaining 372 miles of county roads and 169 county owned bridges. Between addressing bridges with severe deterioration, the county must also proactively replace non-redundant bridges where the failure of one structural member could lead to a catastrophic bridge collapse.
Built in 1950, the Silica Sand Road bridge (CR 253) was a non-redundant pony truss bridge nearing the end of its useful life. With limited funding, the county applied for and was awarded federal money to replace the bridge through the County Engineers Association of Ohio. To meet aggressive timeframes, they chose to advance the project using the design build delivery method.
CEC Approach
CEC teamed with Winters Excavating to provide design-build services for the replacement of the Silica Sand Road bridge over Eagle Creek. Using a collaborative approach, the design build team was able to devise a scheme to replace the aging bridge with a composite prestressed concrete box beam bridge with a single 80’-6 ½” span, supported on integral abutments. The integral abutments are founded on deep pile foundations, with 14” diameter cast-in-place piles. The increase in profile to meet the minimum low chord elevation is accommodated by placing 3’x3’ concrete blocks for a stacked block wall along the right-of-way adjacent to the bridge. Portions of the existing bridge abutments were retained in the design of the new bridge to provide protection against scour.
Design and plans were prepared on an accelerated 4-month schedule. CEC’s role was design, plan preparation, demolition plan, erection plan, and as-built drawings. It was constructed in the Fall of 2023.
