May 15, 200718 yr Link contains a photo. From the 5/4/07 Blade: Bridge memorial gala to go on Fund-raiser moved to riverboat, but goal stays the same By JC REINDL BLADE STAFF WRITER Despite last month's death of a fifth bridge worker, an evening gala to commemorate the finish of the Veterans' Glass City Skyway will go on as originally planned, although the festivities have since been moved onto a riverboat, officials announced yesterday. The $100-a-person event May 24 has been named "Some Enlightened Evening," and is expected to help raise the approximately $130,000 needed to build a permanent tribute sculpture in East Toledo honoring all workers involved in building the I-280 bridge. That stainless-steel tribute sculpture will give special recognition to the four ironworkers killed in a February, 2004, crane collapse, and to Andrew Burris, a carpenter, who died April 19 when the platform on which he was working broke free from the bridge. FULL ARTICLE: http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070504/NEWS16/705040346/-1/RSS10
May 15, 200718 yr From the 5/10/07 Blade: PHOTO: A test run of the lighting system for the bridge pylon, illustrated here, is to occur next week. ( FIGG ENGINEERING GROUP ) VIEW the Skyway animation Skyway set for test run of high-tech light show in Toledo Sneak preview for bridge watchers on tap By DAVID PATCH BLADE STAFF WRITER For Independence Day, the internally lit pylon on the Veterans' Glass City Skyway will light up Toledo's night sky with red, white, and blue. For St. Patrick's Day, the colors could be green, white, and orange. And for the eve of the Ohio State-Michigan football game, maybe scarlet and gray on one side and maize and blue on the other? The possibilities are almost endless. And sometime next week, bridge-watchers will get a low-key sneak preview of the pylon's lighting system when technicians test it to make sure its light-emitting diode arrays and computer controllers work properly. While the test patterns will be nothing spectacular - just small sections of red, blue, and green, the primary colors of light - the system is capable of 16.7 million color combinations, said Mike Gramza, the project manager for the Ohio Department of Transportation. FULL ARTICLE: http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070510/NEWS11/705100358/-1/RSS
May 26, 200718 yr I-75/I-475 JUNCTION Long-term strategy to overhaul busy interchange drives criticism Businessesbristle at plan to shut ramps By DAVID PATCH BLADE STAFF WRITER Gus County is clear about his main objection to the Ohio Department of Transportation’s plans to modernize the I-75/I-475 junction near central Toledo: the loss of access to I-475, which now can be reached from either the Willys Parkway or Berdan Avenue interchanges. “That is the biggest problem. It would create a big disaster for this area,” said Mr. County, president of the Five Points Business Association. During several public meetings about the project that will begin near the middle of the next decade, ODOT officials asserted that their plans for rebuilding the busy freeway junction represent the best compromise they could strike with Federal Highway Administration engineering guidelines. More at: http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070218/NEWS11/70218002/-1/RSS
May 26, 200718 yr I-75/I-475 SPLIT IN PERRYSBURG Interchange work too low on state list, city contends By DAVID PATCH BLADE STAFF WRITER Perrysburg officials hope to persuade the Ohio Department of Transportation to give a higher priority to modernizing the I-75/I-475 junction in their city than was recommended in a state consultant's recent study. While acknowledging that the stretch of I-475 in Perrysburg has problems, however, state planners say sections farther north have more urgent needs, which is why modernizing the Perrysburg junction and the adjacent State Rt. 25 interchange fell to seventh position on a nine-item priority list. For the short term, the rankings may not mean much, because ODOT has assigned no construction money for the $708 million list of potential I-475 and U.S. 23 improvements that Jacobs Associates, a Pasadena, Calif.-based consultant, identified in a report issued last month. So far, only $5 million has been set aside for detailed engineering on the highest-priority section. More at: http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070322/NEIGHBORS03/703210472
May 26, 200718 yr ROAD WORK Costs put squeeze on freeway upgrades I-75/I-475 project's totals get bigger By DAVID PATCH BLADE STAFF WRITER While the Strickland administration has pledged to keep all construction phases for a new four-lane U.S. 24 between Waterville and the Indiana border on schedule, the uncertainty of Ohio's future transportation budgets is illustrated by comments a local ODOT official made last week about the proposed modernization of the I-75/I-475 junction in Toledo. "We're a little uncertain about the funding, especially for the second part of this," said David Dysard, the Ohio Department of Transportation's deputy director for the district office in Bowling Green, during a news conference that focused on this year's construction program but included updates on future plans. Construction budgeting has been hammered by a 40 percent cost increase during the last four years, Mr. Dysard said, because of rising prices for both petroleum and construction materials such as steel and concrete. More at: http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070408/NEWS11/704080310/-1/NEWS
June 17, 200717 yr http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070617/NEWS11/70616027/-1/NEWS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Article published June 17, 2007 ODOT’s largest construction project ever produces Toledo’s ‘signature bridge’ By DAVID PATCH BLADE STAFF WRITER The crew members of the freighter Algowest couldn’t have timed their ship’s arrival any better had they planned it. On a May morning six years ago, state and local leaders cheered the start of a new landmark on Toledo’s skyline — a bridge that would arch high above the Maumee River ending nearly a half-century of river-related traffic delays on I-280. The bells rang on the Craig Memorial Bridge, its gates came down, and freeway traffic ground to a halt as the 730-foot laker emerged from gathering gloom that heralded a spring thunderstorm, sailed past the ground-breaking ceremony, and tooted through the open drawbridge on its way upstream. A week from now, the promise of that morning will be fulfilled when the Veterans’ Glass City Skyway opens to traffic. Toledo’s "signature bridge," the biggest single construction project in Ohio Department of Transportation history, will be sealed and delivered. No longer will I-280 traffic be subject to drawbridge delays — an average of seven minutes per bridge opening, but for freighters like the Algowest, sometimes 15 minutes or more.
June 25, 200717 yr 'At last:' Toledo welcomes bridge BY JOHN SEEWER | THE ASSOCIATED PRESS June 25, 2007 PHOTO: The massive center pylon dwarfs two ironworkers finishing up their work last week. The bridge opened Sunday. BY J.D. POOLEY/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO: Another view of the bridge. BY J.D. POOLEY/THE ASSOCIATED PRESs TOLEDO - A towering cable-supported bridge that opened Sunday gives the city a new symbol. The hope is that it will help bring jobs too. Stretching across the Maumee River near downtown, the bridge on Interstate 280 replaces one of only two drawbridges on the nation's interstate highways. The other is in Washington, D.C. The $220 million bridge is the most expensive in the state's history. It also was costly in terms of lives - five workers died during construction, including four killed when a massive crane collapsed in February 2004. That accident delayed completion of the bridge by more than a year and resulted in fines against the company overseeing the project. Facts about Skyway Cost: $220 million Height: 403 feet Length: 1.6 miles Footage of street cable: 2 million Year started: 2001
April 6, 200817 yr http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080406/NEWS11/804060338/-1/NEWS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Article published April 6, 2008 Icy menace rattles drivers on Skyway Problem linked to unusual weather By DAVID PATCH BLADE STAFF WRITER Skip Honsperger was headed to a Toledo hospital to visit his mother late last month when he saw a sheet of ice drop into the Veterans' Glass City Skyway's northbound left lane while he drove in the center lane. Moments later, another chunk dropped from the I-280 bridge's stay cables right onto his MazdaSpeed 6's windshield, smashing it. Half an hour later, Dearborn, Mich., resident Jeb Kenney - also driving northbound - was headed home from his job at a Ford plant in Avon Lake, Ohio, when he saw several chunks of ice falling from the stay cables, including one that hit a car ahead of his. As with a previous ice incident in December, the ice on the bridge's stays March 28 was from an accumulation of freezing rain the night before. When the sun came out on the more recent afternoon, the stays' stainless-steel sheaths warmed, causing a thin layer of moisture to melt between them and the remaining ice, said Layth Istefan, ODOT's highway management administrator at the Bowling Green district office. That caused the ice to start slipping around the stays' circumference until the force of gravity broke it free in chunks, he said.
January 8, 200916 yr End of work on Skyway bridge now in sight after 8 years By David Patch, Toledo Blade, January 7, 2008 Installing electrical outlets for maintenance workers' future use pales on the glamour scale to erecting concrete deck segments or stringing stay cables, but the work Brian Supplee and Doug Lee did yesterday morning inside a ramp viaduct will be among the final touches before Veterans' Glass City Skyway construction officially ends. "It's neat to be one of the last ones to be out here to fine-tune stuff," Mr. Lee of Green Springs, Ohio, said while packing up gear after the electrical installations in a passageway inside the Greenbelt Parkway entrance to southbound I-280 in North Toledo. The winding down of Fru-Con Construction's work on the $237 million bridge project has been accorded none of the pomp that accompanied the bridge's opening to traffic 19 months ago, or even that of a ceremonial groundbreaking in May, 2001, nearly nine months before the Ballwin, Mo.-based firm received its contract.
July 16, 200915 yr http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090716/NEWS16/907160321 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Article published July 16, 2009 $10.2M rehab of 3 bridges starts Monday, affects I-75 By DAVID PATCH BLADE STAFF WRITER A construction project likely to be Toledo's worst orange-barrel headache of the year is to get into full swing Monday, and it will stick around much longer than the Ohio Department of Transportation predicted earlier this year. The $10.2 million rehabilitation of three bridges near downtown, including the DiSalle Bridge over the Maumee River, will include split traffic patterns for freeway traffic that, while used elsewhere in Ohio in the past, will be set up in Toledo for the first time. Throughout the project, I-75 will be reduced to two lanes each way, with occasional single-lane traffic overnight. Perhaps a bigger deal for local traffic will be ramp closings that, most notably, will block access to northbound I-75 at both Wales Road and Miami Street from mid-August into October.
July 23, 201014 yr -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Article published July 23, 2010 Widening of I-475 to limit access for 3 years By DAVID PATCH BLADE STAFF WRITER After years of planning, a three-year, $64 million reconstruction of I-475 in West Toledo is scheduled to begin next week, bringing with it long-term traffic pain in the area. A groundbreaking ceremony is set for Friday and nighttime preparatory work will begin Monday. The greatest disruption will last about a year, starting late this fall, and affect drivers who normally enter eastbound I-475 at interchanges east of Secor Road. Full story at: Back to: http://www.toledoblade.com/article/20100723/NEWS16/7220368 Project Map: http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/misc?url=/templates/zoom.pbs&Site=TO&Date=20100723&Category=NEWS16&ArtNo=7220368&Ref=AR
August 3, 201014 yr Ground-breaking ceremony marks start of I-475 widening, reconstruction project Article published July 30, 2010 By DAVID PATCH BLADE STAFF WRITER Construction has yet to begin on the $64 million I-475 widening and reconstruction project in West Toledo, but already there has been a schedule change, one that slightly helps drivers who enter eastbound I-475 at Monroe Street. The eastbound entrance at Monroe now is scheduled to close Wednesday night, rather than the previously announced shutdown on Monday. It will be closed for more than two years while the E.S. Wagner Co., of Oregon, rebuilds and modernizes I-475 between Rushland Avenue and I-75. Dignitaries formally broke ground for the project Friday morning near the Central Avenue eastbound freeway entrance, which will close during the second half of August to be replaced by an entrance from a new ProMedica Parkway interchange. Speakers at the ceremony cited several major benefits from the project that include improved access to nearby parts of West Toledo, construction jobs and, in the longer term, replacement of single-lane, bottleneck ramps at I-75 with two-lane ramps. Full article: http://www.toledoblade.com/article/20100730/NEWS16/100739967
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