The new Johnson Street Bridge will be completed late next year, not 2018 as previously forecast, says the director of the project.
Last November, city councillors told contractor PCL Constructors to take steps to ensure the project would be completed in 2017. They also resolved not to pay for any more budget overruns until problems with steel fabrication in China had been resolved.
“I think it’s good that council put its foot down pretty firmly back in November and said we are not going to accept the 2018 completion,” said Mayor Lisa Helps.
“I think we’ve been kind of giving and giving and giving and we finally put our foot down and said: ‘Find a way to get this bridge done in 2017.’ It looks like they’ve adjusted the schedule to do that.”
The quality and timing of completion of the steel being fabricated in China remains “perhaps the most critical issue facing the project,” says project director Jonathan Huggett’s latest quarterly report to council.
Steel problems have dogged the project for the past two years. In July 2014, Jiangsu Zhongtai Steel Structure of China was ordered to stop work after inspectors discovered significant flaws in the bridge steel, including many defective welds. Fabrication resumed in March last year, but with quality-control inspections by contractor PCL Constructors and subcontractor Atema.
The bridge is now expected to be open to traffic in July 2017 and the project is to be completed in November 2017, Huggett said.
The major risk to the schedule continues to be steel fabrication in China — especially of the bridge’s large lift rings, Huggett said. Fabrication of the bridge trusses is nearing completion and the rings are due to arrive in Victoria by the end of 2016.
The approved budget for the project is $96.8 million, but several unresolved issues will require further funding, Huggett said, although the total has yet to be determined for many of them.
Those items include dealing with unforeseen geotechnical conditions, purchase of seabed land, additional professional consulting services, insurance adjustments, city support, legal costs, archeological monitoring, fendering to protect the bridge, and increased quantities of materials.
The costs also do not include more than $10 million in overruns, which are subject to mediation among the city, PCL, design consultant MMM Group and sub-consultant Hardesty and Hanover. Mediation sessions are scheduled for March 7 and 8 and are intended to negotiate a resolution to all claims, Huggett said.
But further mediation may be required to deal with future claims.
“For example, the full consequences of the delay in the fabrication of the steel cannot be determined until the steel has been delivered,” the report says.
Helps said with the many cost unknowns, “we’re not out of the woods yet but it looks like things are starting to get back on track.”
Ross Crockford, director of the watchdog group johnsonstreetbridge.org, said the update doesn’t offer much in the way of new information.
“It seems that everything is kind of moving carefully leading up to this mediation,” Crockford said.
“There are just sort of warnings that more money is going to be needed, but we still don’t know how much.”
When the project was approved by a previous council in 2009, the new lift bridge was forecast to cost $63 million and be operating by Sept. 30, 2015.
