A new way to build bridges

FASTER, CHEAPER, BETTER: CDR Maguire's new bridge replacement product has the opportunity to upgrade the nation's crumbling bridges at half the effective cost. CDR staff, from left: Peter Wu, vice president/Bridge Group manager; David Freeman, vice president/Highway Group manager; Joseph Cardello, principal highway engineer; Bruce Bartel, project manager/principal bridge engineer; Steve Landry, vice president/Civil Group manager; James Coogan, project manager/principal traffic engineer.
FASTER, CHEAPER, BETTER: CDR Maguire's new bridge replacement product has the opportunity to upgrade the nation's crumbling bridges at half the effective cost. CDR staff, from left: Peter Wu, vice president/Bridge Group manager; David Freeman, vice president/Highway Group manager; Joseph Cardello, principal highway engineer; Bruce Bartel, project manager/principal bridge engineer; Steve Landry, vice president/Civil Group manager; James Coogan, project manager/principal traffic engineer.

ARCHITECTURE,

CONSTRUCTION,

ENGINEERING

As with windshield wipers, you never seem to notice or appreciate a bridge as much as when it quits on you.

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Twenty-two percent of Rhode Island’s 1,162 bridges are about to call it quits, or, in the words of the state Department of Transportation, they are “structurally deficient.”

The timing couldn’t be better for a Rhode Island-born and -based engineering firm and its new bridge-building technology that erects steel bridges for the same cost and twice the life span of comparable concrete bridges.

That is exactly what executives of CDR Maguire and its sister company, CDR Bridges, say they have done.

With help from a grant through the federal Accelerated Innovation Deployment program, CDR Maguire has created a folded steel plate girder bridge system that is now commercially viable. CDR Maguire will build seven new FSPG bridges in Pennsylvania by the end of next spring, with six more to follow under that state’s Rapid Bridge Replacement Project, said Carlos Duart, CEO and president of CDR Maguire. Proposals for FSPG system bridges are pending in Colorado, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

Duart said the FSPG system is the first major innovation in bridge construction since the 1970s.

The new element of the system is the design of the beam, a piece of steel that is folded like an upside-down trapezoid. The method works only for bridges less than 60 feet long.

The process takes as little as two days, Duart said, compared to a month to construct a concrete bridge, which cannot by its nature be inserted into the site in pre-fabricated pieces.

“A lot of concrete bridges aren’t lasting even 35 years now, especially in the Northeast,” Duart said. “Our steel bridges, when properly treated, should last 75 to 100 years. You pay the same cost [as a concrete bridge] for double the life.” •

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