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Within the next month, the current Clinton Street bridge will start to be no more.
Washington County Department of Public Works Superintendent Willie Grimmke said the bid has been awarded for the work that will replace the three bridges that allow access to downtown Whitehall over the railroad tracks on Clinton, Division and Saunders streets.
“The bid was awarded in August and the contracts are literally in the mail to get signed as we speak,” said Grimmke. “The next step will be to schedule a pre-construction meeting, which I think will happen pretty soon. After that, we are waiting for them to get their bonding in place and get going.”
The Washington County Board of Supervisors awarded the project to replace the trio of bridges to Harrison and Burrows out of Delmar, which offered a winning bid of $3.85 million to complete the project.
“We received four bids on the project,” said Grimmke. “The two lowest bids were within about $50,000 of each other, which is pretty tight for the kind of money that we are dealing with.”
Harrison and Burrows was the lowest bidder out of the four.
“They were the lowest bid and they were responsible bidders,” said Grimmke.
Grimmke said construction could start within the next two to three weeks.
“As soon as they can turn around and get everything in place for funding, they will begin,” he said. “That will be a two-to-three-week kind of thing.”
According to the preliminary plans, work will begin on replacing the Clinton Street Bridge first before work is done on the other two.
“We will be starting with Clinton Street because it is posted with a weight restriction,” said Grimmke. “Saunders and Division streets are not marked, so you can’t take something out that handles a full legal loads and be left with something that cannot do the job.”
Once the Clinton Street bridge is replaced, the plans call for work to be done on both of the remaining bridges, which is estimated to take until the end of the 2011 construction season.
“It’s now the fall and towards the end of the construction season,” said Grimmke. “We are thinking that it will now be the fall of 2011 before they are picked up and out of there.”
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