US 281 Expansion project team finished 2018 strong, logging more than 166,000 manhours with zero OSHA recordables or lost time accidents throughout the year.
Webber, a subsidiary of Ferrovial, started working on the first phase of the project in August 2017 after almost 20 years of planning and an anticipated 5 years of construction and a total budget of $370 million.
The 3.8-mile first phase of the project had a budget of $192 million and with 19 bridges to build and 43 months to finish, Webber and more than 40 of their subcontractors needed to send 200 workers to site, with teams working 24 hours a day, six days a week, even with some occasional Sunday work sessions to carry out the construction. The achievements in safety with zero safety incidents have been another great achievement—thus calling for a celebratory barbeque as seen in the photographs.
The construction also included 1,500 drill shafts, more than 40 retaining walls, totaling almost half a million square feet, over a million cubic yards of embankment, 540,000 square feet of concrete slabs for bridges, half a million cubic yards of rock excavation for new roads, 12-inch concrete pavement on expressway lanes, totaling 270,000 square yards, and 150,000 tons of asphalt on frontage roads.
The project has both joint-bid as well as non-joint bid utilities including gas, water & sewer and telecom, and the team also has come up with several innovative solutions to work around the design as well as execution of these utilities to keep the project moving forward.
The project team proposed a modified Traffic Control Plan (TCP) that have allowed them to recently start the new phase of the works five months ahead of schedule.
The project will turn the 8-mile divided highway spotted with traffic lights that caused atrocious congestion into a full expressway with bicycle/pedestrian sidewalks/lanes, continuous frontage roads for local access, one high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) Land, and two general-purpose lanes.
