One day at a time

A snapshot of life on the Marquette Interchange reconstruction

By Jeremy Harrell

Silence blankets the project headquarters for the $810 million Marquette Interchange reconstruction at 7:30 on a Tuesday morning in June. A few blocks away, a wide swath of dirt weaves through the sunken urban corridor that was once half of Interstate 43 in Milwaukee. Mammoth piles of backfill support temporary bridges on the western web of overpasses that comprise the interchange. Multiple sites teem with workers and machines driving piles, erecting retaining walls and fitting piers for the new bridges that will soon take shape. Photo by Troy Freund

Silence blankets the project headquarters for the $810 million Marquette Interchange reconstruction at 7:30 on a Tuesday morning in June. A few blocks away, a wide swath of dirt weaves through the sunken urban corridor that was once half of Interstate 43 in Milwaukee. Mammoth piles of backfill support temporary bridges on the western web of overpasses that comprise the interchange. Multiple sites teem with workers and machines driving piles, erecting retaining walls and fitting piers for the new bridges that will soon take shape.

But in the Amtrak station on St. Paul Avenue, where the state Department of Transportation has taken over the top two floors to manage the largest project in its history, the only sounds are the squawks from seagulls and the occasional train horn blaring from below. A few engineers roam the third-floor cubicle farm that was, until just a few months before, filled to capacity with designers finishing up the project plans.

Brian Manthey, the Marquette's chief communications officer, ambles into a conference room to perform his morning ritual. A former radio newscaster and legislative press liaison, Manthey is about to record the day's message for the Marquette Interchange phone hotline.

“It’s my one chance to stay in broadcasting,” he says before looking down at his notes, picking up a phone, and telling the public about lane closures and where people can find more information about ongoing disruptions.

His work isn’t always so easy. A few weeks before, a radio station producer called to ask about a dead body a listener spotted in a sinkhole in the middle of the project. After checking around the office, Manthey learned the body wasn’t dead, and it wasn’t in a sinkhole. Instead, it was Phil Ciha, the project’s structures engineer, who crawled halfway into an empty space below some newly applied pavement. The caller saw Ciha’s legs dangling out and leapt to the wrong conclusion.

In a matter of hours, Manthey had an answer. With all WisDOT’s disparate project-management elements gathered together for the first time in agency history, Manthey simply toured the cubicles and asked questions.

For a press officer, the project is the ultimate job. Thousands of eyes are fixed on the Marquette, and calls from radio and TV stations arrive every day. Similarly, the project’s engineers, designers, safety personnel and accountants know their every move will be analyzed.

“The days fly by,” Manthey says after completing his hotline message. “There are days when I look up and it’s 3 o’clock, and I need to get something to eat. Every day is different, and you don’t know what each day will bring.

“Everybody wants to be here, and they knew coming in here that people were going to be watching and that this would be prime time. This is the project of all projects.”

A crew from Walsh Construction, Chicago, drills shafts for retaining wall 312 on the Marquette's north leg project. Photo by Jeremy Harrell

On that Tuesday, June 21, the north leg of the Marquette Interchange is, taken on its own, the third largest transportation project under construction in America. At $102.7 million, it’s also the biggest single project WisDOT ever launched, and it’s three times the size of the largest project ever undertaken by WisDOT’s southeastern Wisconsin regional office, according to the agency.

And things are only heating up. In August, the agency will open bids for the Marquette’s big prize, the so-called core project, estimated at $350 million to $400 million.

The 4,400 pages of plans for the core project stand 3 feet and need to be carted around on a dolly. By 2008, the core project, at a clip of $2 million of work per week, will deliver a new web of bridges at the intersection of I-43, I-94 and I-794, the tangle of highways that most people think of when they think of the Marquette Interchange.

A project this size demands a new set of rules for WisDOT. Perhaps the most obvious sign is the Amtrak office itself. The arrays of cubes look like any other office, except for one thing. Pinned to every cubicle, tacked to every wall and even emblazoned on a few polo shirts is the telltale sign, the familiar cross of intersecting highways. Though the project under way outside isn’t audible, it’s visible everywhere in the Amtrak station.

The idea of the command center, as Manthey found out, is to generate cross-pollination among the different disciplines, to eliminate any communication barriers and generally ensure that all the moving parts of a project this immense don’t grind to a halt.

Veteran WisDOT engineers work alongside private professionals from WisDOT’s chief consultant, Milwaukee Transportation Partners, a joint venture of HNTB Corp. and CH2M Hill, both Milwaukee engineering companies. They in turn share space with the Federal Highway Administration, a raft of more private engineering consultants who manage day-to-day construction and long-term project schedules and a commercial construction company brought in to handle paperwork.

All are focused on achieving the most sought-after goal in construction: an on-time, on-budget project delivery. And it doesn’t seem to matter who works for what company or what agency.

Crews leave wet earth out to dry on Fond du Lac Avenue, part of the north leg project. The dirt needs to dry before it can be used as a base for the new roadway. Photo by Jeremy Harrell

“Things are so integrated that there aren’t any lines,” says Tom M. Collins, whose firm, Collins Engineers Inc., Cudahy, is supervising construction of the north leg. “We all want this project to go well.”

A good example of the integration occurred earlier that Tuesday while Dan Rivers, WisDOT’s construction supervisor, was on his way to work. He took a call from a contractor on the $40 million west leg project who dialed up to say the 800 yards of fill that had arrived earlier that morning wasn’t up to snuff.

“We had to take a look at it because it wasn’t right,” Rivers said.

Rivers drove to the site, inspected the material and called Steve Maxwell, a geo-technical engineer working in the Amtrak station. Rivers explained the situation and Maxwell, relying on his years of experience, deemed the fill unsuitable and ordered it off the project.

“Usually, we have to call Hill Farms [WisDOT’s central office in Madison],” Rivers says. “If this were to happen on any other job, we’d be waiting for testing and retesting. Here, we can just make a decision. The good thing about this is that we have advanced experts.”

Rivers comes to the Marquette Interchange from WisDOT’s regional office in the Wisconsin River Valley. Like just about all of his colleagues at the Amtrak station, he applied vigorously to be part of the team.

Tracy Gilliam, a design engineer who left behind his work on rural interchanges after interviewing several times for the Marquette position, can relate.

Ryan Luck (left), project manager for the Marquette Interchange core contract, discusses the job with Doug Dembowski, a freeway operations engineer. Photo by Jeremy Harrell

“If something like this comes up again, it’ll be at the end of my career,” he says. “This is magnitude times 10, but the concept is still the same. Each of us looks through the prism of our experience. This project is certainly one that will expand your mind.”

Ryan Luck is definitely experiencing some mind expansion. WisDOT tapped him to manage the core project, and he spent the last 18 months on the job reviewing his task and studying plans from other parts of the Marquette to gain a clearer picture of the whole project.

On that Tuesday morning in June, Luck is in a conference room with three regional managers for lighting, traffic and intelligent transportation systems, the intricate network of cameras and sensors that monitor cars and trucks on the interstates. The three managers aren’t directly tied to Luck’s project, but he wants to make sure they’re in step because a project of the core’s size will assuredly affect them.

“I want to have really seamless communication because the pace of this project is beyond what we typically see,” Luck tells the three as the meeting begins. “My style is that before starting on a big project, everybody needs to get together.”

For the first 20 minutes, Luck and the three regional managers talk mainly about how to deal with the staggering amount of paperwork the core project is likely to produce. There’s some low-level grousing about who needs to send whom how many copies of what. Quickly, however, Luck hears what must be music to his ears.

Ryan Luck (left), project manager for the Marquette Interchange core contract, discusses the job with Doug Dembowski, a freeway operations engineer. Photo by Jeremy Harrell

“Bear in mind that whatever we’re doing is not to fortify our little empires but to keep the project moving,” says Charles Landrey, a WisDOT regional lighting engineer.

Later in the day, Luck joins the project’s top brass for a long session about the next day’s big event, which is the last mandatory pre-bid meeting for contractors interested in bidding on the core project. Luck says most of Tuesday’s meeting entails deciding what to tell the contractors, down to the exact phrasing of some statements, about special contract provisions and requirements. The project team also wants to present a face for bidders to contact, since they will undoubtedly have questions they don’t want to bring up at the meeting, Luck says. “Contractors don’t want to tip their hands during a meeting with other contractors.”

After the pre-pre-bid meeting, Luck talks about the job before him. The cubicles that are now empty will soon fill up as the core project hits its stride, and Luck knows a large wave is cresting above him. It’s either sink or surf.

“There’s a mixed bag of trepidation, anticipation and happiness,” he says. “I’ve worked my whole career working toward this point. My main goal is to use the full power of this team. I realize it’s a huge job, but in my career, I’ve pushed to get the most challenging projects.”

Don Reinbold, WisDOT’s project manager for the entire Marquette job, worked for the department in 1968 when the original interchange opened in downtown Milwaukee.

“I spent a lot of my career out in the field,” he says. “I’ve been there and done it.”

Kitty Reed, a labor compliance coordinator, interviews a driver for Dunlap Trucking LLC, Milwaukee, to make sure he’s being paid the prevailing wage. Reed conducts several site interviews each week. Photo by Jeremy Harrell

On June 21, for instance, he attends the biweekly meeting of the change-management committee, a panel of supervisors and engineers who provide the project’s long-term vision. The committee helps ensure that hiccups in the first days of the project won’t be repeated three years later. It’s a WisDOT innovation that will likely be copied on big projects in other states.

In the afternoon, Reinbold switches to another conference room for the weekly progress meeting, featuring many of the same players, and hears about day-to-day project management covering everything from detour routes to the delivery of 800 yards of bad fill. Still later in the day, Reinbold joins Luck and others as the project team discusses the next day’s prebid meeting.

“I look at my job as meetings,” Reinbold says, “but every one has a specific purpose.”

The meetings keep Reinbold on top of the entire project and are emblematic of the preparation and care that have so far kept the Marquette from spiraling out of control. “We struggled early on to make sure the estimate was good, eliminating the unknowns before reaching a number,” he says. “Our lettings, so far, have been on the mark.”

Tom Collins is one of the people making sure the numbers add up. In the morning, he’s out on the north leg construction site surrounded by a swirl of dump trucks unloading earth excavated from the intersection of I-43 and Fond du Lac Avenue. The area sits on top of natural springs, and the dirt is soggy, too wet now to serve as the base for the concrete that will eventually be poured.

Collins picks up a chunk of dirt that’s been poured from the dump trucks and manipulates it like Play-Doh. He points to the acre of soil mounds around him and says that it’s undergoing a process known as scarification, a drying-out that will transform the mud into usable base.

Nearby, Kitty Reed, a WisDOT labor compliance coordinator, interviews dump-truck drivers to make sure they’re being paid prevailing wages.

On the second floor of the Amtrak station headquarters, engineers responsible for direct project management arrange themselves at desks and cubicles. Photo by Jeremy Harrell

Collins studies the loud, dusty, sweltering scene and mentions that in a few weeks, the project team will shut down the highway overnight to conduct four major projects, including the demolition of another bridge that spans I-43.

“There won’t be a single car, but there will be more construction traffic than you can believe,” he says.

It’s the end of the day on June 21. The construction workers have all gone home, and the Amtrak station office, abuzz in the afternoon during so many meetings, has returned to its morning calm.

Manthey and Ciha, the structures engineer, are recalling the moment when an interchange driver thought Ciha was a cadaver in a sinkhole. “It was a void space under the freeway,” says Ciha, a structural engineer with 12 years of experience. “Often, your most valuable tool is a visual inspection.”

The discussion turns to the team aspect of the project, the way that Manthey, Ciha and others could quickly head off a public-relations fiasco because all the important players were right there in the Amtrak station.

“Our team, with our unique structure, is able to mobilize resources in a way that’s not like other projects,” Ciha says. “I know the team we have will take on any issue that arises.”

Manthey has a question. “Do you ever wonder where you’re going to go next? Not physically, but mentally? There’s going to be a decompression time.”

Ciha sighs. “What are you going to do next? I don’t know. There’s such a spark, such an energy to this project.”