Innovation and experience help keep Mississippi River bridge replacement on schedule

Client

The Ames Team

Location

Perryville, MO, and Chester, IL

Challenge

Replacing a bridge that supports 7,000 vehicles a day with a safe, reliable, and durable structure with minimal impact to traffic – and doing so on time and on budget – is the Missouri Department of Transportation’s goal with its Chester Bridge design-build project. The original bridge was built in 1942 for vehicles to cross the Mississippi River between Perryville, Missouri, and Chester, Illinois, without using a ferry. Vital to agricultural traffic and area industries and travelers, the new bridge aims to reduce the number of flood-related closures and better serve today’s traffic and community.

Keeping a major bridge project on track requires trust and excellent communication between the DOT, contractors, and consultants. Based on successful work on similar transportation and alternate delivery projects, Terracon was hired for the critical task of managing the bridge’s quality program. Our role is to help verify that the bridge meets all MoDOT and engineering requirements and that any defects are identified and corrected. We’re inspecting rebar, the installation of the stay cables, the erection and installation of the steel members and cross beams, and more. We are also testing concrete, aggregate, and soil, and performing high-strain dynamic testing and analyses for driven pipe pile.

Solution

Terracon’s safety culture, our experience with large design-build bridge projects MoDOT’s rigorous safety standards informed our quality program for the Chester Bridge. We’re providing construction engineering inspection (CEI) and testing services, including both quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC). Prioritizing helping our inspectors and technicians receive DOT-required certifications and experience on job sites and with DOTs gave us a trained workforce ready to tackle the bridge build.

While we have the largest network of accredited and validated labs in the country, we created a MoDOT-verified field lab to efficiently confirm that the concrete, aggregate, and soil met standards of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). Our team’s experience setting up and working at on-site labs simplified the process for us and our clients alike.

When it comes to materials testing and communication, we’re continually innovating ways to manage data more efficiently to help keep large transportation projects on schedule. A recent breakthrough is our data collection software solution that provides near real-time inspection daily reports (IDRs), giving clients updated information throughout the construction process to react to and plan for. Instead of manually writing results in the field and typing them into reports, then attaching photos later, the team enters materials testing data into their smartphones, and photos are automatically embedded. The software also enables crews and inspectors to communicate better day to day.

Results

The Chester Bridge project is on schedule and budget so far. It is scheduled to open in December 2026.

Recognition

Our work on the Chester Bridge project was highlighted by Engineering-News Record Midwest as a reason we were named its 2024 Design Firm of the Year.