Sitka’s John O’Connell Memorial Bridge

By Aaron Unterreiner

of PND Engineers, Inc. and key members of the O’Connell’s bridge design team, pitched the idea of cablestayed crossings years earlier for both the Susitna River and Copper River crossings.

“I had proposed the first one in 1962 when I had just come back to Juneau in ’61,” said Peratrovich, who was born in Southeast Alaska and earned his civil engineering degree in Washington State in the late ‘50s. “That’s when I submitted the drawing of the Susitna River Bridge—1,000 feet across, two twin towers, a 500-foot middle span. It would’ve worked, but it was way too early. My chief bridge engineer… he was sitting down at his table working over something. I came in with my drawing of the cable-stayed, and he looked at that and started shaking his head, looked up at me over his glasses and said, ‘Roy, it’s too early.’”

Peratrovich stowed the cable-stayed bridge idea in his back pocket. He was eventually promoted from Department of Highways Bridge Design Section squad leader to section head in 1969.

“Back in ’69, when we started looking at alternate crossings for Sitka—what type to use, where to put it, how would it fit in with existing situations and future improvement to harbor work and all that—I had this cable-stayed, and I said, ‘That would be ideal there.’”

Peratrovich finally got his wish. As design squad chief, his bridge design team included Bill Gute as the design and plan preparation lead and Nottingham on design check and final structural analysis. Fred Kohls was the computer section lead, assisting Nottingham with one of the first computer-aided structural engineering designs in Alaska history.

“We didn’t have the computer programs yet,” said Peratrovich, who deferred to Kohls, Nottingham, and the Department of Highways’ new IBM 1130 Computing System unfortunately titled STRESS: an acronym for its Structural Engineering System Solver software.

“We had this paper-fed thing; you get this pile of responses and answers in this thing on folded paper that you’d pull out and spread all the way down to Seattle if you let it,” Peratrovich said. “It was just so much paperwork that you gotta go through; it just didn’t have the capabilities for doing structural work that was needed on this job. There was so much deflection analysis that had to be made because you had different deflection capabilities at different points where the cable was attached. It was pretty complicated, but Dennis figured out a way to do it.

“Later on, when the improvements were made on structural analysis, we went back and checked it again,” Peratrovich said, “and, sure enough, it was still working.”

The project was overseen by Department of Highways Commissioner Robert Beardsley. The winning bid for the project was $3.2 million in 1970; construction was completed in 1971. Beardsley was succeeded in 1972 by Commissioner Bruce Campbell, who presided over the O’Connell Bridge’s grand opening on August 19, 1972. None of the bridge design team members were present at September’s dedication. Peratrovich, who founded PND with Nottingham in 1979, spoke to PND about the O’Connell Bridge design in 2019 during the company’s 40th anniversary celebration.

“I’ve been with the department for twenty-two years, and I love these kinds of projects,” current Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities (formerly known as the Department of Highways) Commissioner Ryan Anderson said at the ceremony. “There are so many stories. Whenever you work in the transportation industry, you look around at everything that was built, there are stories everywhere. This project in particular—with the innovative design and the way that people thought about this in 1972 when they built it— really is an example for us as a state, as the Department of Transportation, of how we want to move forward.”

Historical Perspective

Alaska State Senator Bert Stedman, who has represented Southeast Alaska in the state legislature since 2003, graduated from Sitka High School in 1974. He was 16 years old when the bridge opened.

“When they built the bridge, it was pretty exciting in town,” Stedman recalled during the ceremony. “I happened to have [spent] that summer fishing out of Petersburg and bought a car when I got home. So, once it got shipped up here and I got to drive over this bridge—that was a couple of months after it was built, of course—but it was a big thing for the kids at the time to be able to drive over to Edgecumbe [on Japonski Island] and back. I think the police stayed over here [on Baranof Island], so we kind of enjoyed that until they figured it out.”

The resulting benefits of the bridge, however, were no laughing matter; its presence remains a boon to the City & Borough of Sitka today.

“When we look at this economic development, once the bridge was done, there’s been construction over on Japonski for almost fifty years straight, and you can really see it today with the hospital going on and the expansion of the Coast Guard,” Stedman said. “Without the bridge, my guess is Mount Edgecumbe High School wouldn’t be there; the hospital would probably be in Juneau. The Coast Guard would probably still be there because they like the seclusion and the location, but it was really an anchor point in the

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