BALTIMORE — A dance of heavy machinery is playing out on the Patapsco River as hundreds of tons of steel move intricately to rebuild an iconic piece of Baltimore infrastructure.
The Maryland Transportation Authority is installing test pilings to determine if current designs created by Kiewit will operate as expected for the new Key Bridge replacement.
"We have two of the largest rotating cranes on the east coast here. Those are necessary because of the sheer size of the piles that we're using here. They're 200 feet long. They're 8 feet in diameter, 1.5 (feet) thick walls. They are in the range of 340,000 pounds each," said Brian Wolfe, MDTA engineer.
Massive cranes install 340,000-pound test pilings for Key Bridge replacement
Each pile is slammed into the channel floor by a hammer that weighs more than 100 tons.
"What this load frame and this load test program will do is it will verify the assumptions that we've made and the design calculations and the design plans that we've put together," Wolfe said.
"We're testing these to 10 million pounds, so this is the support for the new bridge," said Jim Harkness, MDTA chief engineer.
While barges are setting the pilings, the remaining ramps onto the former Key Bridge are being removed. Four sections of the southern ramp have been removed, and work will start on the northern one soon.
"We have 13 spans on this side of the bridge, each of the large girders, and there's 7 girders on each of those spans. They weigh approximately 50,000 pounds. We have a crane working to pick each of those girder sections. Some of them are single picks, some of them are double picks, and they are working their way down to the abutment where the bridge touches land," said Jason Stolicny, MDTA engineer.
The goal to finish the new bridge has been marked as 2028, but that timeline remains uncertain while the design phase continues.
"We don't have that information yet. We still have to get to this point where we're reaching the 70% design, and at that time we can really start to understand the impacts on scheduling costs for the 70% design plans that we have," Harkness said.
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