Tennessee Picks Kiewit for $787M Mississippi River Bridge Replacement

Kiewit Infrastructure South Co. will lead the development of a $787.5-million substitute of the Interstate 55 bridge crossing the Mississippi River between Tennessee and Arkansas at Memphis.

The challenge, additionally dubbed America’s River Crossing, will exchange the present 75-year-old I-55 bridge so as to add capability, enhance security requirements, guarantee route resiliency and preserve optimum operational circumstances, according to the Tennessee Dept. of Transportation (TDOT). The Building Supervisor/Normal Contractor settlement with Kiewit Infrastructure South is being finalized.

A shared effort of TDOT and the Arkansas Dept. of Transportation (ARDOT), the brand new bridge might be bigger and designed to satisfy trendy seismic codes, because it sits on the New Madrid fault line. 

Constructed earlier than the U.S. Interstate system, the bridge was not constructed to Interstate requirements, per TDOT and ARDOT, and because of its age and development, seismic retrofits had been decided to value between $250 million and $500 million, classifying it as a non-candidate for that retrofitting. The present bridge is roughly 5,222 ft-long, together with method spans, based on ARDOT. 

In response to project information, the design of the cable-stayed bridge might be based mostly on “displacement-based seismic design” philosophy, which seeks to evaluate the displacement capability of a construction and its inherent hysteretic damping underneath a given loading. 

Utilizing that method, the bridge might be designed to stay undamaged and operational following a 1,000-year seismic occasion, and resist collapse with a 2,500-year seismic occasion. The design is anticipated to cut back seismic demand on bridge foundations by 25% or extra. 

In October 2024, TDOT selected Parsons Transportation Group Inc. for engineering and design companies. Design is underway on the challenge, set to begin right-of-way acquisition later this yr and start development in fiscal yr 2026.

In a December 2023 application for the federal Bridge Funding Program, TDOT and the Arkansas Dept. of Transportation (ARDOT) listing the estimated complete value of the challenge at $787.5 million, and a four-year development interval anticipated to wrap up within the third quarter of 2030. 

The challenge was awarded practically $400 million from the Federal Freeway Administration’s (FHWA) Bridge Funding Program, and the Tennessee and Arkansas departments of transportation every are committing as much as $200 million towards the challenge, which marks the most important single transportation funding in state historical past for Tennessee, TDOT says. 

In its announcement of greater than $5 billion in Bridge Funding Program awards, the FHWA says the challenge will obtain $394 million as a part of a spherical of grants “that may fund the reconstruction, restore and restoration—utilizing American-made supplies–of 12 nationally important bridges.” 

The bridge will help the anticipated 64,000 automobiles that may cross the Mississippi River between Arkansas and Tennessee every day by 2050, TDOT says. Presently, greater than 38,000 automobiles per day cross the bridge.