Construction crews made some big progress Thursday in the effort to improve traffic on Interstate 205, but upcoming work is going to mean some likely congestion around Clark County’s busiest interchange.
On Thursday, crews from Cascade Bridge LLC finished the first of five concrete pours on the 560-foot onramp bridge from Northeast 18th Street onto southbound I-205. The bridge surface requires 500 yards of concrete and two weeks of drying time before the side barriers can be built and other finishing touches are made. The Washington State Department of Transportation planned to get started much earlier, but last week’s cold and wet weather delayed the pour.
“This is a big milestone for us,” said Brad Clark, a design construction engineer with WSDOT. “We can build a wall any time; it’s not every day we get to build a 560-foot-long bridge.”
The bridge girders were set in September. On Thursday morning, trucks lined the shoulder of the freeway and dumped their loads of wet concrete into a large pump truck. The pump truck then forced the concrete up through its boom arm and onto the deck below. Laborers directed the mixture across a thick grid of steel bars while a large machine rolled behind them and smoothed the surface.