Forging a `false' flyover.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

The flyover going up at Interstate 5 and Belt Line Road has assumed the outlines of a roller coaster, with pieces of the highway pointing sharply down and sharply up, even though the final product is supposed to offer a smooth ride.

"It looks kind of ragged. And it looks like, wow, those aren't going to connect very well," said Joe Harwood, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation.

But that's a "false" impression, in road building parlance. Step one in building a freeway flyover is to do the "false" work, or to build a structure that will serve as a temporary support for the final swooping arch.

"All that rusty old iron and steel that you see now, all that stuff goes away. It will be that smooth and sleek bridge that we all want to see," Harwood said.

The roller-coaster false work is just another stage in the multiyear, $72 million expansion and renovation of the freeway interchange. The work is scheduled for completion in late summer 2008. The whole project aims to end the accident-prone traffic weaves of the original cloverleaf configuration.

The two-lane flyover - made to carry traffic from northbound I-5 to westbound Belt Line - will be 2,400 feet long and 50 feet in the air at its highest point.

Next up, crews from contractor Mowat Construction of Clackamas will begin building the major supporting column in the median between the interstate's north and southbound lanes.

Beginning in May, they'll pour the column and then build a false work platform at the top, similar to those on the site today. Scores of workers spend their days laboring on top of the platforms. The contractor even hoisted up a portable toilet for them.

The ironworkers, carpenters and pile bucks at work on the platforms all have one thing in common: fortitude. They must climb high up on open scaffolding stairways to get to their work site.

They work and they rest without shelter - even through some of the freezing periods this month, said Nathan Neal, an ODOT inspector who oversees the work atop the platforms.

"They are tough. I'll give them that," he said.

Crews eventually will link the platforms over the I-5 and Belt Line lanes.

That will require occasionally closing one lane of the freeway and sometimes stopping traffic entirely to swing the heavy steel I-beams in place, but Eugene-Springfield residents who pass through during the day shouldn't be inconven- ienced.

"We want to have as little impact on traffic as possible, and nighttime is the best time to do that," Harwood said.

$72 million

The cost of the flyover project

at Interstate 5 and Belt Line Road

2,400

Feet the flyover will carry traffic from

northbound I-5 to westbound Belt Line

2008

The year that the two-lane flyover

is expected to open in late summer