A few minutes past midnight, two Sundt interns received the all-clear call. They climbed over the barrier and landed on an I-5 free of traffic. But they were already an hour behind schedule.

The Sundt Transportation team working on the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project included summer interns, Amelia Kline and Violet Petersen. They spent months planning and preparing for the 14-hour closure with the main goal to demo and replace a sign bridge. Kline and Petersen tracked the job by the hour.

 

Preparing for each hour of the closure

Kline: “We were told on day one of the internship about the upcoming closure. We were given little tasks to kind of get into the process. Eventually, as we started becoming more regular at those meetings, they’d ask us to help more, like ‘Hey, can you work on a staging plan to get these trucks in here?'”

Petersen: “There were a lot of details we had to think about. It’s not just, ‘Oh, the crane goes here.’ You need to think through where the crane is coming from. How is it going to get there? Where are all the trucks going to stage?”

Project Executive Kenn Hallquist has 28 years of construction experience and leads the Sundt/Hamilton joint venture.  “We had 14 hours. The team came together, and that was a great plan. It was months in the making,” said Hallquist.

 

10 P.M. – 11 P.M. Closing I-5

A subcontractor was used to clear the highway of traffic and close I-5. They set up detour routes and message boards to alert drivers to exit the highway.

Petersen: “Special traffic control trucks came in and slowly blocked off traffic and dropped cones. Then police drove through to make sure that it was clear and there were no stragglers.”

Crews waited nearby for the all-clear call to start work. But a truck broke down during closure setup. This caused an hour delay before the team could even start the work.

 

12 A.M. – 1 A.M. Work begins

Once the freeway was cleared, crews immediately moved into their preassigned roles, with cranes and manlifts. Kline and Petersen gathered field updates and reported progress every 15 minutes to leadership.

Kline: “It was a little surreal. We jumped the barriers, and we’re just on I-5. Last week I was on my computer writing out the plan for where everything is going to go, and here is the actual thing happening.”

 

1 A.M. – 2 A.M. Installing the new sign bridge

Petersen: “It was really cool to see how we did so much in one night. We took down the cantilever signs and the old truss sign, and then we added the new one.”

One crew rigged and lifted the new sign truss while another began removing the existing sign bridge.

 

2 A.M. – 3 A.M. Removing the old sign bridge

Kline: “In planning meetings, we toyed with a couple ideas of how we were going to get the old sign bridge down. You could try and unbolt everything, and so it’s still a structure that we could, in theory, put back up. Or we could torch cut. They went up there with these torches and lasered it into pieces.”

Unbolting and reusing the old sign bridge sounds efficient, but the process to access and remove every bolt from a 90-foot-tall, 120-foot-long steel truss takes time and could lead to more issues. Torch cutting allowed the crews to section the structure and remove it in large chunks. During the demo, lead was detected in the old sign materials or paint. The crew used enhanced PPE in addition to the protective gear required for torch work.

 

3 A.M. – 4 A.M. Placing the new sign bridge and making up time

Kline: “You could stand and see all four activities happening at once. The cantilever signs were at one section, and then we had our new truss getting installed, our old truss getting demoed, and then our girder was right next to it.”

With the work moving faster than anticipated, the team saw an opportunity for a girder placement that would help with the future widening of the highway.

As the girder was lowered into place, crews found existing rebar that would prevent it from seating properly.

Petersen: “We were not expecting to have to bend the rebar. Then you’re trying to lower the girder, and the rebar is in the way. At that moment, the priority was setting the girder. It was already on the crane. You have to make adaptations.”

Rather than cut reinforcing steel needed for future widening, crews received approval to heat it and bend it back. The girder could then get set and secured.

 

4 A.M. – 5 A.M. Finishing the sign bridge bolt-up

With the girder secured, crews unrigged it from the cranes. The new sign truss bolt-up continued while the last pieces of the old truss were loaded onto trucks for removal.

Kline: “Removing the old sign bridge went very smoothly. It took a little bit of extra time, but eventually we brought the whole thing down. We loaded it all up and boom, that’s all done, perfect.”

 

5 A.M. – 6 A.M. Adapting to issues and finding solutions

After the new truss for the sign bridge was fully assembled, an ODOT representative spotted issues with the new signs. One sign had the wrong exit number, and an exit-only panel used green instead of the required yellow background. The old signs were already being removed, and the freeway could not reopen without signs.

Petersen: “When I first heard that it was wrong, I was kind of freaked out and super stressed, but people kept their cool. It was a really quick and easy adjustment.”

The team worked through the options with ODOT. Freeway guide signs are built from modular number and panel elements.

 

6 A.M. – 9 A.M. Getting the freeway ready to open

The major parts of the scope for the closure were done. The final work included some additional replacement of signs before removing all the equipment from the freeway.

 

9 A.M. – 11 A.M. Reopening I-5 two hours early

Crews adapted and completed the work including the added girder placement two hours ahead of the built-in schedule buffer. The planned 14-hour closure became a 12-hour operation.

Hallquist: “Even with that additional work, we were able to finish early. It was a well-coordinated dance out there.”

The closure was a success and a good practice run for the next closure, a five-week one that began in mid-September. Crews will work seven days a week, 24 hours a day to widen I-5 through Portland and build a cover over the freeway.

Kline: “All the people we worked with were so knowledgeable and helpful. It was cool to watch and see all the work go up. I was happy to just be a fly on the wall and learn.”

Petersen: “A lot of us have to take the freeway to get home. It was cool to drive under the sign bridge and think ‘wow, this didn’t exist 12 hours ago.'”

After the summer internship, Kline and Petersen returned to finish their degrees at Oregon State University.

Learn more about internship and career opportunities with Sundt.