IDOT Composite Bridge Installed in Under Five Hours Over Little Canteen Creek, Fairview Heights, IL

By John Gaudio,

Last Tuesday, March 16th, 2010, in just under five hours Keeley and Sons installed this thirty seven foot composite bridge over Little Canteen Creek in Fairview Heights IL.  The bridge was built in Denver, Colorado by Infrastructure Composites International, and trucked to Illinois late last year.  It consists of four sections, two of which include integrated guard rails.  See link below for more photos.

The bridge was built using Infrastructure Composites' proprietary large cell honeycomb technology, developed by John Kunz, one of the owners of Infrastructure Composites, and his father Ben Kunz.  This makes it possible to create bridges with remarkable strength at weights typically 75-85% less than traditional steel or concrete bridges, making the installation of a complete bridge much faster, easier, and less expensive, when compared to the installation of typical bridges.  Pre fabricated bridges like these have a projected lifetime of 50-75 years, and can be installed at the site in one day.  This avoids lengthy road shutdowns, traffic disruption, and the high costs associated with both.

This technology can also be used to put new decks on older bridges, making it possible to re-rate those older bridges for a much greater traffic load than that for which they were originally designed, and solving a common problem with bridges built decades ago for lower load ratings.  Why can these bridges be re-rated?  Because the existing structure now has to support only 15-25% of the static deck load for which it was originally designed, leaving a great deal more capacity for increased traffic loads, and eliminating the need for a new bridge. This makes for huge savings, not only in money, but in time, and labor as well, when compared with the cost of replacing existing bridges with conventional steel and concrete technologies.

Infrastructure Composites can be reached at 858-537-0715.
 
(Disclosure: I have known John Kunz for over 20 years, own a small amount of stock in Infrastructure Composites International, and provide photo, video, and Internet marketing services for the company.  Please contact me at 303-870-1044 if you need similar services.)