Fed funding pushes construction start on Washington-Oregon bridge
16 July 2024
The Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBRP) programme between the US states of Washington and Oregon received about US$1.5 billion from the US Federal Highway Administration鈥檚 Bridge Investment Program, which will help kick off the first major phase of the project: replacing the Interstate Bridge.
The IBRP said the structure will be replaced with a 鈥渘ew seismically resilient, multimodal solution鈥.
The recent grant is in addition to $600 million in funding announced by the federal government鈥檚 Department of Transportation earlier this year.
The more than $2 billion from US agencies along with $1 billion from each state puts the total raised at more than $4 billion.
The entire Interstate Bridge project is expected to cost more than $6 billion and will eventually build-out highway expansions and connections on both the Oregon and Washington sides.
With more than half the projected total allocated, pre-construction for the bridge replacement is expected to start soon. The program, however, is still in the design phase, considering four different single-level designs, one double-level scheme and a moveable steel girder concept.
Contractor and subcontractor information is not yet available, and principal construction is expected to start in 2026.
The Interstate Bridge connects the cities of Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, with a six-lane stretch of the US Interstate 5 motorway. It鈥檚 actually two nearly identical steel vertical-lift, Parker through-truss bridges, one of which opened in 1917 and the other in 1958.
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