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JENNIFER FARRELLFour Florida projects of PCL Civil Constructors have structural issues, and the firm's future in the state is in jeopardy.
The Tuesday collapse of a section of the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway marked the fourth large-scale project built in Florida by PCL Civil Constructors to be plagued by a high-profile problem.
It was unclear what measure of responsibility, if any, the Canada-based contractor would ultimately bear for the accident; officials said another firm conducted the soil tests that might have shown the likelihood of sinkholes.
But the accident is another black eye for the contractor, which is already facing a review by the state Department of Transportation on whether the firm will be able to bid on future state projects after its certification runs out at the end of the month.
"It does seem like an unusual number of very visible mishaps," said Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke University and the author of Engineers of Dreams, a book about great bridges.
Based in Alberta, Canada, PCL is one of the leading general contractors in North America. The company builds a range of projects - from office towers and airports to roads and bridges and industrial mills. A representative in PCL's Tampa office could not be reached on Tuesday.
In Clearwater, a litany of blunders on the new Memorial Causeway bridge led the state Department of Transportation to halt most work on the $69-million project until PCL can come up with acceptable fixes.
Meanwhile, cracks throughout the new bridge and on the John Ringling Causeway in Sarasota prompted DOT engineers to raise questions about a pattern of sloppy work by PCL.
And in South Florida, crews dropped a section of concrete bridge at the Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport. Afterward, PCL performed repairs before the DOT could finish a review of the repair plan.
In Clearwater, the DOT has said the four columns supporting the bridge's tallest and widest span are so cracked they may have to be demolished and rebuilt. Engineers are also studying whether that section of the roadway might have to come down, too.
Another part of the roadway fell 7 inches when scaffolding underneath it buckled in February. In December 2002, crews used explosives to drop an 80-foot section of the bridge span after it fell a foot and twisted when a section of scaffolding failed.
And a DOT report released this month showed that all the spans have minor cracking, the result of a revamped engineering design that didn't account for high bending forces during construction.
In Sarasota, work was stopped on the Ringling Causeway Bridge after cracks were detected in the roadway. Also, the spans were misaligned and a pier was cast improperly.
In Hillsborough County, problems occurred earlier with supports in the elevated bridge in the median of the Selmon Expressway. Inspectors discovered PCL did not build the columns to specifications, said PerryDawn Brown, spokeswoman for the Tampa-Hillsborough Expressway Authority. But an engineering review found that the mistake didn't reflect unsafe work, Brown said later. Rather, PCL had installed more steel reinforcements than were called for in the bridge plans, she said.
- Jennifer Farrell can be reached at 727 445-4160 or farrell@sptimes.com