Cass Politics

Posted By J.T. on May 25, 2009

From the Star-Herald:
Allen Edmonds

Work to reconstruct the U.S. 71 interchange at 163rd Street will be delayed at least a month after the contractor encountered unanticipated problems with the underlying rock where key bridge foundations must go, the Missouri Department of Transportation announced (5/12).

MoDOT and Belton had planned to shift U.S. 71 traffic onto the new bridges and re-open 163rd Street to through traffic by the end of June, and Mayor Jimmy Odom is livid at the recent development.

“I’ve been out to their (MoDOT’s) office and told them of our concern that during the winter, Ideker was doing very little work. They promised me that if we let them shut that down that they were going to work on it during the winter and do the things that they could do. I feel that if they had done the work that they said they were going to do, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about running into a problem,” Odom said.

The contractor offered to attempt to meet the original deadline – at a cost, Odom said.

“They said ‘we’ll do overtime for $20,000 and maybe get done by the first of July. The problem I have with that is that we spent $2 million in order to make this happen and let them shut the road down and it offends me that they would even call me to say that. They’re not guaranteeing anything – even with the extra money.

“As mayor, I’m very offended that we were treated this way, not only by the state but also by the contractors. They should have at least stayed on track during the winter and then we wouldn’t have had this problem.”

Odom said he had been in touch with state legislators as well as U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Kansas City) to express his displeasure.

“They’ll be remiss to have me recommend Ideker for any future jobs,” he said.

The traffic backups resulting for the interchange closure have dogged the city for the entire project – as M-58 remains the main access to the major portions of both Belton and Raymore.

MoDOT spokesman Steve Porter said he understands Odom’s anger.

“It’s a disappointment for everybody – Belton and MoDOT are in this together,” he said.

While the complete closure did speed the overall project up, Porter said, “it is still something that is just aggravating – maddening – to have to deal with this.

“The situation is this: whatever’s under the ground, you can drill for and test for the best that you can, but whenever you get in there and start doing the work, and you find something isn’t the way it was in the hole that you put five feet away from where you are actually going to be doing the work,” it changes the direction of the entire project, he said.

According to MoDOT district construction and materials engineer Perry Allen, the delay was completely unanticipated.

“All the information that we got prior to the project was that the rock that we were going to put the foundation on was sound material,” he said.

“When we got down to the elevation, we found the area where the footing was lined up to be for the bridge – the foundation itself – there was a huge fissure (gap) through the rock that had filled with mud over the years.”

The bridge foundation was designed to rest on solid rock over a large area, and Allen said that in order to make the bridge work, the foundation had to be redesigned from a large mass of concrete to a combination of piling and spread concrete.

He said similar issues have been encountered on the M-150 project just to the north, “so it’s not really uncommon to find this – it’s just not real frequent. We typically find our foundations to be what we anticipate and we don’t usually see rock changing this dramatically.”

Category: Belton, Raymore
Tags: Belton, Raymore