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The Board of Public Works approved a $75 million contract Wednesday to hire three firms that will oversee construction management services on the Francis Scott Key Bridge, as the replacement project gets under way in earnest this spring.
The companies, a consortium calling itself Bridging Maryland Partnership, will be responsible for planning, engineering, surveying, construction management and more.
“The Bridging Maryland Partnership is responsible for ensuring that this bridge is built safely, that it’s built sustainably and smoothly and importantly, as swiftly as possible,” said Gov. Wes Moore (D), one of three members of the board along with Comptroller Brooke Lierman and Treasurer Dereck Davis.
It has been just over 10 months since the container ship Dali lost power as it was leaving the Port of Baltimore early on the morning of March 26 and ran into a support for the Key Bridge, which collapsed into the Patapsco River in a matter of seconds.
The collapse killed six road workers who were patching the bridge at the time, pinned the Dali in place and sent thousands of tons of rubble into the Patapsco River, blocking the channel that ships use to get in and out of the port. It also severed a major route for truck traffic around Baltimore and shut down a toll road used by more than 30,000 vehicles a day, which collected $56 million in tolls a year.
Federal and state officials immediately vowed to rebuild the bridge, with President Joe Biden pledging that the federal government would fully fund the project. By June, salvage crews had freed the Dali and reopened the shipping lanes to the port, and in August the state awarded a contract to Kiewit Infrastructure to be the contractor on the project.
Current plans call for a replacement bridge to follow the same path of the old bridge, and to be four lanes wide, as the original bridge was. But the new Key Bridge would be much higher and wider than the old bridge, to allow for the possibility of even-larger cargo ships in the future. Preliminary plans envision a bridge span 230 feet above the river at its highest point, compared to 185 feet before, with piers supporting the center span 1,400 feet apart instead of 1,200.
In order to accommodate the higher span in the same footprint, the new bridge will likely be a cable-stayed design as opposed the truss style of the old span. The project is expected to take years to complete and cost more than $1.7 billion — some of which has already been recovered in lawsuits filed against the owners of the Dali.
Moore praised the work of the state’s congressional delegation, which secured a promise of 100% federal funding for the bridge project last month; the Army Corp of Engineers, which cleared the shipping channel into the Port of Baltimore in a little more than 11 weeks, instead of the 11 months originally predicted; and the Maryland Transportation Authority which worked “around the clock” to get to this point.
“The fact that you moved so expeditiously, it wasn’t just important but it gave us a huge sense of confidence in establishing our commitment that we were going to get this done on time and get this done on budget,” Moore said at Wednesday’s meeting. “Because you cannot have a fully functioning Port of Baltimore without a Key Bridge. Full stop.”
The Bridging Maryland Partnership is made up of WSP USA out of New York, Johnson Mirmiran & Thompson based in Hunt Valley, and Rummel, Klepper & Kahl of Baltimore. The contract awarded Wednesday calls for “a wide range of professional engineering consulting areas, including transportation planning, project planning, land surveying, public involvement, forestry and landscape architecture, environmental sciences, project management, and engineering services,” according to board documents.
Bruce Gartner, the executive director of the MTA, said residents near the bridge can expect to start seeing preconstruction work this month, on land and in the water, where people will see “boats, small barges and small cranes” drilling, collecting soil samples and mapping the river channel. That work is not expected to significantly disrupt traffic on the roads or in the port channel, he said.
“Probably one of the more anticipated milestones, demolition of the existing piers, is planned for this spring,” Gartner told the board. “We continue to advance the … preliminary designs and we hope to bring those forth to you to engage on some of those design elements in the very near future.”
Board members had few questions, but lots of praise for the project’s managers.
“It’s really impressive. It’s exciting to get going,” Lierman said after Gartner’s appearance.
