Dewberry has announced that it was presented with an Honorable Mention Award – Project of the Year, by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), North Jersey Branch, for its engineering and design services on the Bloomfield Avenue Bridge (County Route 506) rehabilitation project.
Dewberry provided preliminary engineering, final design, and construction support services to rehabilitate this circa-1911, single-span, concrete T-beam bridge carrying Bloomfield Avenue over NJ TRANSIT’s railroad system. The design restored the bridge’s structural integrity while minimizing impacts to motorists, pedestrians, and railroad operations.
The physical constraints imposed by the bridge site, the skew at which Bloomfield Avenue crosses NJ TRANSIT’s tracks, the non-redundant structural framing of the original concrete T-beam superstructure, the connection of NJ TRANSIT’s catenary system to the bridge, and the presence of critical utility lines all complicated the rehabilitation. The solution utilized prefabricated superstructure units to improve the vertical clearance over the tracks, improve the quality of the completed product, reduce the duration of track outages, and shortened the overall construction duration. To facilitate the staged replacement of the deficient superstructure, a strong-back girder was designed to temporarily support the loads imposed on the portion of the original superstructure, which remained in service during the initial construction stage.
