Contractors to replace pier cap

But builders plan to appeal to claims commission over costs

A Colorado-based joint highway construction venture said it will follow an Arkansas Department of Transportation directive to replace a pier cap on a new White River bridge for Interstate 40 in Prairie County as soon as high water recedes from the site.

But the joint venture of Parson Construction and CJ Mahan Construction also said it will appeal the agency directive to the Arkansas Claims Commission to seek “reimbursement of all costs and delay impacts associated with the directed extra work to our contract.”

“For the record, our intention is, and always has been, to follow the contract,” Gary Yancer, a joint-venture member and managing partner with CJ Mahan, said in a letter to the agency dated Monday and obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Tuesday.

The correspondence was the latest turn in a dispute over who should pay to replace the pier cap that could add $11 million or more to the cost of the $100.6 million project that’s been beset by delays, mostly because of high water that has inundated the site.

Removing the existing cap and replacing it with a new one is expected to extend completion of the bridge into next year.

Yancer offered the response after he and other joint-venture executives took the unusual step of air

ing their grievances with the department last week in front of state lawmakers.

At issue is the structural integrity of the pier cap, the 17th and final one to be installed on the new bridge.

Last August, a lightning storm interrupted a concrete pour on the final cap, a delay that department officials said left the concrete improperly set. Such delays risk setting a plane, or “cold joint,” within the pour. A pour containing a “cold joint” lacks the strength of a solid pour.

The joint-venture team, which has decades of experience in road and bridge construction, said it took the necessary steps to avoid a “cold joint,” including the use of a retarding agent in the concrete mix designed to ensure it wouldn’t set during the delay. Extensive testing reviewed by a third-party engineering consultant supported their position.

Even if the department required replacing the cap, the delay should be labeled an “act of God,” which would require the department to shoulder the costs, the joint venture maintained.

The department said only the joint venture was to blame and therefore must replace the cap and pay for its replacement.

Emanuel Banks, the agency’s deputy director and chief engineer, cited, among other things, that the joint venture “elected to begin the pour … on a night with a questionable weather forecast.”

“A delay of a day or two in pouring the cap could have prevented this issue entirely,” he said in a Feb. 14 letter, giving the joint venture 10 days to replace the cap and challenge the decision through the appeals process outlined in the contract.

Banks said Tuesday that in light of Yancer’s response and conversations agency officials have had with the joint venture, he expects the contractors to honor the contract and begin removing the cap within 10 calendar days of the river level receding to one foot below the work road surface. Banks said it could take a month or a little longer before that happened.

Yancer said in his fivepage letter that despite agreeing to proceed under the contract, the joint venture continued to take issue with “certain mischaracterizations of events and ensuing ‘choices’ that have brought us to the current state of things.”

For instance, he objected to Banks’ characterization that the joint venture proceeded with the August pour despite the “questionable weather forecast.”

Yancer said weather forecasts reviewed before the pour indicated no more than a 30% chance of precipitation on the night of the pour. Any severe weather was expected to remain north of the of the site, according to the same forecasts, he said.

Joint-venture supervisors on-site agreed the pour should go forward as did department representatives on-site, Yancer said.

“A 30% chance of rain confirmed by multiple weather forecasting services is not a ‘questionable’ weather forecast, and the decision to go forward was not questioned by anyone present at the site in real time,” Yancer wrote. “In fact, no reasonable construction professional would cancel a concrete placement on the basis of a 30% chance of rain during the summer months in Arkansas.”

Further, he said, under the terms of the contract, the department inspector had the authority to reject the work or materials “until any questions at issue can be referred to and decided by the engineer.”

“Rather than rejecting the work, the inspector participated in the decision to proceed with the work and the means and methods to be employed to re-start the pour,” Yancer wrote.