Press Coverage

44 csengineermag.com august 2019 To expedite the construction, TxDOT also employed a disincentive/ incentive strategy. As part of this strategy, TxDOT set the contractor three milestones with penalties for exceeding the timeline and bonuses for early completion. The first milestone, which had to be substantially completed in 150 working days, required opening the two new bridges for Slaughter Lane, opening one MoPac main lane in each direction, and closing a single frontage road lane in each direction. This mile- stone also required opening the DDI in temporary configuration. Tx- DOT set the disincentive/incentive for late/early completion at $20,000 per day. The second milestone, which required substantial completion in 70 working days with a disincentive/incentive of $15,000 per day, involved opening Slaughter Lane and all the frontage roads within 300 feet of Slaughter Lane in the final DDI configuration. The third and final milestone required opening La Crosse Avenue bridge and a single MoPac main lane in each direction in 70 working days, with a disincentive/incentive of $10,000 per day. "The goal is to motivate the contractor to complete the project ahead of schedule," said Ralph Condra, P.E., LAN's project manager for con- struction engineering and inspection services. "TxDOT employs this strategy for critical projects where traffic inconvenience and delays need to be held to a minimum." Thanks to these innovative design and construction strategies, TxDOT and the project team have kept the project on schedule and under bud- get. The construction of the $53.5 million project began in January 2018 and is expected to be completed in winter 2020. "The Slaughter Lane and La Crosse Avenue intersections are the only remaining at-grade intersections in the entire MoPac corridor," said Short. "This project will help us remove a critical bottleneck and go a long way toward reducing congestion in southwest Austin." BOB AUSTIN, P.E., is a vice president at Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam, Inc. (LAN), a national planning, engineering and program management firm. He can be reached at RDAustin@lan-inc.com. Increasing variability and extremes in weather create increased op- erational risk for critical defense installations. These extreme weather events test the infrastructure resilience, degrade infrastructure, and lead to delays as well as concerns about continuing operations. According to the US Department of Homeland Security, Infrastruc- ture resilience is the ability to reduce the magnitude and/or duration of disruptive events. The effectiveness of a resilient infrastructure or enterprise depends upon its ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and/ or rapidly recover from a potentially disruptive event. The impacts of Hurricane Florence on Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point (MOTSU) helped identify vulnerabilities in its infrastructure and more specifically in its railway network. In a resource limited environment, the emphasis on repairing the railway infrastructure is summed up in one word – capacity. One railcar can hold the equiva- lent of roughly four truck loads. Additionally, one train can haul the equivalent of over 400 trucks. In order to move 400 trucks on the road, Staying on Track Maintaining Railway Resiliency: A Strategic Asset Management Approach to Lifecycle Optimization By Meg Vermillion Civil Works Contracting's highrail dump truck spreads ballast along the railway post-repairs. Photo: Meg Vermillion

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