Glendale Team Puts Its Backbone Into Spine Project
At Watco, we like to solve customers’ supply chain challenges. A few weeks ago, a big accomplishment was successfully wrangling 27 massive steel bridge girders in Glendale, Arizona. The Arizona Department of Transportation is replacing an aging bridge on an interstate highway south of downtown Phoenix. At Watco’s nearby Glendale Transload Terminal, the team unloaded and stored the continuous-welded steel plate girders, each about 80 feet long and weighing up to 15 tons, and later delivered them to the job site. General Manager Robert Martinez said the Glendale team was called upon for this project because they’d done a similar project for another customer. “I think it has a lot to do with how long the team has been here in Glendale and our level of experience,” he said. “It takes special skills to handle beams that weigh that much and are that long.” The busy Interstate 17 bridge over Central Avenue carries an average of about 125,000 vehicles daily. The bridge update is part of a broader, long-term transportation plan involving a 31-mile corridor that’s considered a primary passageway for regional traffic. Known as the “Spine,” the corridor handles
12 The Dispatch | July 2021
more than 40 percent of the region’s daily freeway traffic. In April, BNSF delivered the beams to the Glendale facility. Foreman Antenogenes Barajas and Operator Esteban Hernandez used a 36,000-lb.-capacity Hyster forklift to unload the girders to the ground for storage and later onto three extendable flatbed trailers for delivery. In typical Watco fashion, the Glendale team got creative and modified their extended stretch trailers to better balance the lengthy beams. “Toward the front and back end (of the trailers), there’s a ridge,” Martinez explained, “and we had to build special boards to get the load to stay level.” From May 26 to June 10, drivers Ivan Ferrin and Joe Sandoval made 27 individual girder deliveries to the job site – at night in order to minimize any disruption to traffic flow. The new construction will extend clearance on the bridge, built in 1962, by just over 2 feet to a national design standard of 16 feet. In addition, the construction will accommodate a future extension of the area’s light rail system under the interstate and contribute to future plans for widening I-17.
