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One job left to do on Cape bridge

On a chilly day in December 2003, the ribbon was cut and the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge opened to traffic.

Detail work remained, including adjusting the aesthetic lighting and running power cables to the aviation lights on top of the bridge. Those items took a few months.

But there was, apparently, one detail overlooked. As Missouri Department of Transportation employees were going over paperwork for the bridge recently, they found that no one had removed 20,000 cubic yards of fill dirt and rocks dumped by contractors so workers could reach the coffer dams where bridge piers were constructed.

Last week, MoDOT workers began digging out the fill. "It is actually just cleaning up from the Emerson Bridge construction," said Cheryl Ball, assistant district engineer with the MoDOT office in Sikeston.

The fill material was put in place under a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is in charge of the Mississippi River and any activity on land inside the levees that could affect water flows. "They let us put it in to build the coffer dam," Ball said. "We were to get it out as time permitted."

The department estimates that it must remove 20,000 cubic yards of fill material, but it could be more, Ball said. "As they are digging it out, we'll get a better idea of it," Ball said.

The rock and dirt to be removed is enough to pile the arena floor of the Show Me Center to a depth of 17 feet.

Although it has been almost four years since the bridge opened, the matter of removing the fill hadn't been noticed by the corps' regulatory branch, said Nicole Dalrymple, spokeswoman for the corps' St. Louis district office.

"I talked with several folks in our regulatory branch, and it wasn't us" who contacted MoDOT, Dalrymple said. "Nobody from the office has contacted them about it."

The corps issued numerous permits for the bridge construction, Dalrymple said. In places where the construction forced the alteration of the landscape, for example, MoDOT was required to take steps to mitigate any loss of wildlife habitat.

To leave the fill in place, the corps would have needed to issue an amended or adjusted permit, Dalrymple said.

MoDOT wasn't required to mitigate the placement of the fill material in the river because it was considered temporary, she said.

When all the requirements of a permit are met, Dalrymple said, the permit holder is required to send in a completion certificate.

Whether the corps would have ever noticed if MoDOT didn't remove the fill material is a matter of speculation. The regulatory branch of the corps pulls out a random sampling of 5 percent of the outstanding permits each year for review, Dalrymple said.

The removal of the fill material could take several months, Ball said. Trucks have been doing the hauling for about a week. She did not say where the material was being dumped.

The need to remove the fill was discovered several months ago, but the work was delayed because road crews had higher priorities during the summer months, Ball said. The work should be the last item for MoDOT to declare the $100 million bridge job complete, she said.

"We want it out of the river because the river needs to be where it was before the bridge was built," Ball said.

rkeller@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 126