Traffic Payout

by guest blogger Joe Irwin

Snapshot of the work at the SR 520 Pontoon Construction site

What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens in Aberdeen goes around the world.

Working with our contractor Kiewit-General this week, we installed a webcam at the SR 520 Pontoon Construction site, providing people everywhere a peek at one of the state's mega projects.

The camera takes photos every 10 minutes at the site, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can watch the work happen as it happens – which will include everything from excavation of a casting basin large enough to hold an aircraft carrier to construction of floating bridge pontoons the length of football fields.

The website will store all these photos, so you can also turn back the clock to view previous work on the job – hours, months or years after it occurred. You can also use the time lapse function, which takes a photo each day, to watch months and even years of construction whiz by in just a few minutes. A photo calendar provides an additional tool, giving a way to scan the project a month at a time and key in on certain dates of interest.
Work started at the 55-acre site on Grays Harbor in February, and since then we, along with K-G, have been busy clearing, dewatering and driving 900 steel piles 135 feet into the ground to construct the foundation for the pontoon casting basin.

Excavation of the 4-acre basin starts the week of April 18, and requires crews to remove upward of 260,000 cubic yards of material. As sections of foundation piles are driven and dirt is excavated, workers will begin placing concrete for the basin.

We are on track to start constructing 33 pontoons this July that will be used to form the backbone of a new SR 520 floating bridge. The pontoons will be built in six cycles with the final cycle being completed in May 2014.