Crews Are Finally Ready to Complete Pittsburgh's Liberty Bridge
Punch list items will be finished by January
Punch-list items are just about all that remain to be completed in the effort to rehabilitate Pittsburgh's Liberty Bridge, according to the Pennsylvania Dept. of Transportation. The three-year project was hampered in September 2016 by a fire that shutdown the bridge for 24 days.
Crews will continue to seal sidewalks and fix a damaged pedestrian railing through January. On Aug. 14, a driver hit the railing on the Boulevard of the Allies, which feeds into the bridge and is included in the project's scope. PennDOT says it will seek reimbursement for the $30,000 railing from the driver.
In July, the $81.8-million project's completion date was pushed to Aug. 26 after PennDOT gave the contractor more time to install extra items that weren't part of the project's initial scope. Those items included fiberglass bird screens to protect the bridge's box chords across three spans totaling 664 ft in length. At that time, PennDOT also asked Fay to seal the bridge's sidewalk. The discovery of unforeseen steel work also set the project back at that time.
PennDOT says the bent pedestrian railing and the sidewalk sealing work pushed the work that was supposed to be completed by Aug. 26 into September. Punch-list items include project clean up, pressure washing and repointing decorative sandstone, touching up paint, asphalt sealing and form work removal.
