Bridge spawns rumors, speculation

WASILLA -- For several months Wasilla-area drivers have been passing a partially built bridge over the railroad just south of the intersection of the Parks Highway and the Palmer-Wasilla Highway. The bridge is part of the Palmer-Wasilla Highway extension project, which will open sometime before the end of this year's construction season, and extends the Palmer-Wasilla Highway to Knik-Goose Bay Road near Glenwood Avenue.

People who are prone to rubbernecking get a view of a piece of road that's sort of hanging in midair. The deck of the bridge is in place but the road leading up to it is unfinished. The bridge is also sloped from front to back and from side to side so that each of the four corners of its rectangular plane have different heights. In short, the bridge looks off-kilter, like a table with legs that don't match.

Alaska Department of Transportation (DOT) officials -- some of whom are engineers -- admit that the bridge looks odd, but say there is nothing wrong with it and that the project is moving along as scheduled.

"It looks like if it stayed like that, then in the winter all of the cars would slide right off," said Carol Collins, manager of USTravel - Alaska, on Financial Drive just south of the light at Palmer-Wasilla and Parks. "I would trust that they know what they're doing, but it does look weird."

USTravel shares a former bank building with a military recruiter's office, a coffee and ice cream shop, and a couple of other businesses. The road project and its odd-looking bridge bring comments, questions, and rumors right to Collins' door practically every day. There are even rumors circulating in Wasilla that one company went out of business and stalled the construction project.

Rumors of any company's demise are greatly exaggerated, according to Ron Arvin, the general manager of Chenega Management LLC, DOT's prime contractor on the job. Arvin said those rumors likely started when Chenega's heavy equipment supplier moved a large number of machines from the job site all at once after most of the excavation was completed. When he talks about the job, Arvin's speech is inflected with jargon that rivals that of a brigadier general or computer programmer.

"There was a whole bunch of [equipment] out there when we were doing the massive ex. When we were done with that, the contractor de-mobed a lot of it all at once," Arvin said. Chenega has healthy business relationships with its equipment supplier and the other subcontractors on the job, according to Arvin, who said work will start up at the site as soon as weather permits, likely sometime in April.

According to DOT spokesman Murph O'Brien, the project wouldn't be stalled even if the worst had happened for one of the contractors.

"Even if somebody did go broke, it will get built anyway," O'Brien said, "Construction contractors post a bond to ensure that the contract gets completed-- it's a safeguard to ensure that the public project goes forward."

As for the bridge, DOT project manager Pat Wittrock said everything is coming along to specifications, even though it looks odd.

"It's more of an optical illusion than anything else. It doesn't look right and it shouldn't look right because it's not done yet," Wittrock said. "Once it's complete, when you're driving on that road you probably won't even realize you're on a bridge."

Wittrock said the bridge isn't level because it is part of a hill and part of a curve. The road rises to clear the railroad tracks and curves to the west to avoid Cottonwood Creek. Slightly banked corners aren't uncommon on highways, according to Wittrock.

It's no stock car track out there, but Alaska's highways have lots of banked roads. Slightly banked turns allow vehicles to safely negotiate corners at higher speeds than on level corners. On the new bridge, the bank effect seems more pronounced because the bridge's deck was installed first and work stopped for the winter before gravel fill was added around it. The out-of-context bridge gives passers-by a cutaway view of the angles and lines that normally only engineers like Wittrock are privy to.

"If you took a piece of any of our roads and chopped off the road out of the front end and out of its back end and left that one piece there, it would look weird too -- especially if it's on a curve and going up a hill," Wittrock said.

Wittrock has also heard rumors about the bridge not being built properly. He said the bridge is fine, the project is going along smoothly and it won't cause cars to slide off the road once it's opened.

At the other end of the project, the new intersection of Palmer-Wasilla Highway and Knik-Goose Bay Road will have a traffic control light, and Glenwood Avenue will be realigned to intersect with the new stretch of Palmer-Wasilla Highway. The lights were installed last fall, but haven't been turned on yet. The signal lights will be activated once the new traffic pattern is in place. Until then, Wittrock said, there aren't enough cars at the intersection of Glenwood Avenue and Knik-Goose Bay Road to warrant a signal light. Wittrock expects the new Palmer-Wasilla Highway extension to be popular among drivers who want to avoid the intersection of the Parks Highway and Knik-Goose Bay Road.

"It makes a sweet little connection going from the Parks to Knik-Goose Bay, it should take a lot of the traffic off the Parks there," he said.