Officials agree to delay Highway 20 roadwork.Byline: Tim Christie The Register-Guard The state Department of Transportation and a California road The branch of the California Trail John Fremont followed from Westport Landing to the Wakarusa Valley south of Lawrence, Kansas became regionally known as the California Road. contractor have agreed to suspend work on a troubled Coast Range highway job until they can figure out cheaper fixes to the massive and numerous landslides that have dogged the project. The $150 million Highway 20 project will create a wider and straighter seven-mile section of road to replace a notoriously narrow, curvy and deadly 10-mile stretch between Pioneer Mountain and Eddyville. Highway 20 is the main route between Corvallis and Newport. But the project has turned into a morass of environmental degradation Environmental degradation is the deterioration of the environment through depletion of resources such as air, water and soil; the destruction of ecosystems and the extinction of wildlife. , threatened cost overruns Noun 1. cost overrun - excess of cost over budget; "the cost overrun necessitated an additional allocation of funds in the budget" cost - the total spent for goods or services including money and time and labor and a criminal investigation. On Wednesday, the contractor, Granite Construction Granite Construction is a member of the S&P 400 Index, and is the parent company of Granite Construction Company, one of the nation's largest heavy civil contractors and construction materials producers. Inc., and ODOT ODOT Oregon Department of Transportation ODOT Ohio Department Of Transportation ODOT Oklahoma Department of Transportation announced they had struck a deal intended to keep the project moving and to limit cost overruns. Granite is a publicly traded company publicly traded company A company whose shares of common stock are held by the public and are available for purchase by investors. The shares of publicly traded firms are bought and sold on the organized exchanges or in the over-the-counter market. based in Watsonville, Calif. It created a joint venture with a subsidiary, Wilder Construction, called Yaquina River The Yaquina River (yuh-KWEN-uh) is a river, approximately 50 mi (80 km) long, on the Pacific coast of Oregon in the United States. It drains an area of the Central Oregon Coast Range west of the Willamette Valley near Newport. Constructors to build the Highway 20 project. Under the terms of the deal, work on the project will be suspended Sept. 1 and resume no earlier than June 1, 2008. During that time, the state and the contractor will work together on finding solutions to the formidable geotechnical challenges posed by the project. Under a best-case scenario, work will resume next summer and the project will be completed in 2010. Worst case, work resumes in 2009 and the job will be completed in 2011, ODOT spokesman Joe Harwood said. The two sides have agreed to share in the overhead costs overhead costs see fixed costs. that occur during the suspension of work, which are expected to run $100,000 to $200,000 per month, ODOT said. Once they figure out how much it will cost to fix the landslide landslide, rapid slipping of a mass of earth or rock from a higher elevation to a lower level under the influence of gravity and water lubrication. More specifically, rockslides are the rapid downhill movement of large masses of rock with little or no hydraulic flow, problem, the state and the contractor will attempt to negotiate who will pay how much, but if they're unable to strike a deal, the issue will be decided by a three-person dispute resolution board, ODOT said. "It's going to go up but by how much no one knows," Harwood said. Granite officials said they stand to lose up to $20 million on the project. Granite was awarded the contract to design and build the project in July 2005. The job requires building eight bridges on slopes as steep as 40 percent while protecting more than 20 creeks and streams through a landscape that gets upward of more than; above. See also: Upward 90 inches of rain a year. Granite began work on the project in spring 2006, Harwood said. Last summer, the company cleared more than 160 acres, clear-cutting trees and chewing up the soil to get the stumps out, he said. But the contractor was not installing erosion control Erosion control is the practice of preventing or controlling wind or water erosion in agriculture, land development and construction. This usually involves the creation of some sort of physical barrier, such as vegetation or rock, to absorb some of the energy of the wind or water measures to protect the streams, so when heavy rains came in September, "We got muddy water into salmon-bearing streams," Harwood said. "A huge mistake." Granite spokeswoman Jacque Underdown said the company "could have done a better job" with erosion control," but that no one could have predicted the heavy rains. As a result, the state Department of Environmental Quality fined ODOT $90,000. DEQ DEQ Abbreviation for the Incoterm "Delivered Ex Quay." fined ODOT, rather than Granite, because ODOT was responsible for ensuring the contractor adhered to environmental regulations, Harwood said. Those slides, and the damage they did to salmon streams, have prompted the Oregon State Police to launch a criminal investigation, Harwood said. State police spokesman Gregg Hastings confirmed his agency is investigating but declined to discuss details. Underdown said the company is aware of the state police investigation and has offered to provide any assistance that is requested. In March, Granite asked ODOT to terminate or suspend its contract because of the numerous landslides on the project - 11 all told. Fixing the landslide problem would cost another $61 million and add an extra two years to the project, the company said. State officials balked balk v. balked, balk·ing, balks v.intr. 1. To stop short and refuse to go on: The horse balked at the jump. 2. , saying Granite knew about the landslides when it signed the contract. They insisted that the company complete the work it agreed to. The company said it knew about the landslides, but there was no way it could have known about the magnitude of so-called ancient landslides - slides hundreds or thousands of years old that became unstable when logged. "Some of these landslides were 100 feet deep," Underdown said. As the two sides talked, state officials considered their alternatives and decided the best way to get the project done and protect taxpayers was to keep Granite under contract and work together on a better solution to the landslide problem, Harwood said. ODOT officials were "fairly certain" that if they terminated the contract with Granite and rebid re·bid v. re·bid, re·bid·den or re·bid, re·bid·ding, re·bids v.tr. 1. Games To bid (a previously bid suit) again in bridge. 2. the project, all the risk factors associated with the job - the landslides, the heavy rains, the short work season, plus bad publicity hanging over the project - would result in substantially higher bids to complete the job, Harwood said. Had ODOT attempted to enforce the contract with Granite as written, it could have ended up in a costly, lengthy court fight with an unknown outcome, he said. "Our goal is to get this delivered, and in the interest of time we believe taking a cooperative, collaborative approach, where there's shared pain from a financial standpoint, is going to get us to the finish line quickest," he said. ODOT officials also believe it's the least expensive alternative, he added. For more information on the project, go to us20pme.com HIGHWAY 20 PROJECT For more information on the $150 million (to date) Highway 20 Pioneer Mountain-Eddyville improvement project, go to us20pme.com |
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