The Western Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (WASHTO) this week awarded one of its highest honors, the “America’s Transportation Award,” to the Washington State Department of Transportation’s new Tacoma Narrows Bridge project.
America’s Transportation Award recognizes achievement in the development and construction of transportation projects, and instills an appreciation of transportation as a key element of our quality of life. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge project team received top honors in the category for “on time delivery” for projects exceeding $200 million.
“We are honored by the recognition that this project was really something special,” said Paula Hammond, Washington State Transportation Secretary. “This award is shared by the thousands of community members, engineers, and workers that made this project a success. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge project required ingenuity, perseverance and a dedicated team to build one of the countrys largest public works projects in the last decade.”
The “On Time Delivery” category recognizes a project demonstrating specific measurement, process management and quality assurance methods used to deliver a quality product and demonstrate effective schedule management from conception to completion. This category also demonstrates involvement and interaction with the surrounding community and illustrates the degree to which traffic movement was improved for customers/users.
The new Tacoma Narrows Bridge is the longest suspension span built in the United States in more than 40 years. The toll-financed bridge carries four new lanes of eastbound traffic toward Tacoma, the second largest city in Washington State. The new parallel bridge span has not only reaped huge congestion benefits, but also has made crossing the Narrows safer for vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists by separating opposing traffic and providing a 10-foot-wide barrier-separated pedestrian walkway.
The project cost $724 million and required more than 3 million hours of labor to build with only three time loss injuries. The overall project was delivered weeks ahead of schedule, five years after breaking ground. When construction began on the bridge in 2002, 90,000 cars a day were crossing the existing bridge, which was only designed to handle 60,000.
This award isn’t the first recognition the team has won for the project. The new Tacoma Narrows Bridge has won several regional and national awards including the Washington Aggregate and Concrete Associations Excellence in Concrete award, the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) Platinum Award and the ACEC Grand Award.
