Anyone have any construction mistakes in their area? This can be roadways, building, bridges, you name it etc... And it can also be engineering problems, crappy work, etc...

Here in Jacksonville we have several. Probably the biggest here is on a bridge called the Dames Point Bridge. This is a suspension bridge that is nearly 3 miles long. I think it has over a 45 degree incline, so it goes straight up. Then on one side of the bridge it goes down and then back uphill again. The only problem is that they did not put any emergency breakdown lanes on this bridge. Well they did, but they are only about 2 feet wide. Not enough for a car if they breakdown or have a flat tire. That is just one bridge. We also have another bridge called the Matthews bridge that has about 500 feet of steel grating near the top. We just had an incident 2 weeks ago where someone lost control because of that and was thrown over the side of the bridge about 75 feet into the water and died.

Also we have several places here where they were building roads and just decided to stop and never bothered to do anything with them and they are real eye sores. One is at the intersection of Interstate 95 and Interstate 10. They built a ramp that goes nowhere. It just sticks out like a sore thumb. There are several other places like this that they started but never done anything with. The sad thing is that they have been there for several years now. They really make the city look bad, especially with the superbowl coming here soon.

Anyone else have anything like this?

 

OH YA WE DO.... Here in Ma. you got all the major streets
( and a bunch of side streets ) that have what i call the manmade
bumps. Construction crews dig up the road for one reason or another then they don't repatch to match the surface they just ruined. Or in construction of the sewer and water systems they put the manhole covers right in the exact spot your pass. side is while traveling down the lane. Your front ends are subjected to serious havoc solely by the unproffessionalism of some slackers.
And i can say that with confidence because that's what they are.
Some crews take pride in their work, you see them in the morning digging and when you go by later that night they have put it all back together as if it never happened,and you look at that and say why didn't they do that on the other street, and it's
because it was a different crew.... the SLACKER crew....

https://www.f150online.com/galleries....cfm?gnum=4362

 

Here's one...when I worked construction we were building a 3 story office on the side of this creek that got dammened up to creat a pond behing it(they called it a Lake). This building had a garage under it and the drainage for this spilled out into the creek. We were going to pour half the second floor this one day but it called for rain and of course our Super was an idiot and decided to pour any way. Well a Northner came through and dropped the temps to near frezzing and it rained buckets. Since we started we couldnt stop and went ahead with it. We spend the majority of the day saving that pour by squeegiing off the water. Of course the plain of the floor went to the elevator shafts which went to the garage floor and out those drains. Well the creek turned pure white and all the lye and calcium in the concrete killed off the fish for miles downstream. By the time the city and EPA got through with the company it was a sizable fine. But thats not all. It was almost three weeks before the next rain and when it did it was a frog strangler. The gargage was fininshed enough that some of the crew were parking thier cars down there. Because all that fine concrete had been sent down that drain it actually took a 16 inch pipe and reduced it down to a 2 inch opening in a sagging portion of the pipe under the floor of the garage. To say the least the garage filled with about 6 feet of water and all those cars were actully floating around and banging into the columes that supported the building. We had to evacuate the building and get pumper trucks out to save the building. To say the least that Super was out of there.

 

Money in Nova Scotia is hard to come by so when we do a job, it gets done right the first time...We have some of the best Companies here that can build about anything very well...After all You don't want your name on something that is build half *** here...

 

Finally... An unbiased opinion.

 

Hey, Paulv107 -

I was in Jacksonville for the first time around the end of June. Was looking at houses there, some place called Eagle Harbour which is on the West side of the river (crossing 295) which if I remember correctly was called Buckman Bridge. As far as bridges over rivers go it seemed OK. Didn't take the Dames Point bridge though . . .where is that?

You're right about the 10 / 95 interchange. What a mess that is. Major construction going on. What with all that construction are they not going to fix the ramp youmentioned. Best I could tell they were building the 95 north transition to the 295 West (and vice-versa) (Colud be wrong about that . . .drove thru it pretty quick) .

 

Completely agree. Glad I have a truck. NY is just as bad though. But it isn't manmade.

Visited NY this weekend and on the way down passed a van that had been struck by a fallen I-Beam from one of the overpasses. Completed totaled the van. The man had leg and head injuries. He was alive the day after, but the road was shut down Friday night till at least Sat.

 

I really think there is a racket going on in my city. I think the mayor is making up BS jobs saying they are going to cost X ammount and then taking Y off of it.

For example they built this brand new street and had the meddian be cement. A year later they decided to beautify it by putting grass and tress in. Then 6 months later they went back and cemented half of it back in.

It took them 5 years (no joke) to build a 1/4 mile "bridge" (really a road over a flood plane) to connect two neighborhoods.

Now they are going to build a 5 - 14 connector that is 8 miles long but going to cost over 200 million dollars.

Yet the Walmart and hundreds of homes go up in the blink of an eye.

I was reading a article in the newspaper. The average house cost 138,000 dollars in my city in the year 1997. Now the average cost is 500,000. Good thing we moved in in 1988

31C

 

You were only about 10 minutes from my house. I love off of Blanding blvd in Orange Park, which by the way can be a very dangerous road. Eagle Harbor is a very nice place with some very nice homes. Not too crowded but not out in the woods. Most people come to Orange Park or surrounding communities to live because homes are much cheaper than almost identical homes in Jacksonville.

The Dames Point bridge is at the North end of town near the airport. When they built our loop I295 they only made it half way around the city. It went from I95 at the north end to I95 at the south end of the city. Well they decided now to finish the loop all the was around the city. And yes that intersection is a mess right now, but it will be one nice intersection. I think everyone will be glad when the get done with all of the road construction, but of course you know that will never happen. There will always be road construction.

Jacksonville and Orange Park are pretty nice though. We do have some areas that are nasty and bad, but over all it pretty nice. We have the beaches and its only about a 45 minute ride to St Augustine, the nations oldest city. Lets just say it would be a world of difference from LA where you are.

 

MILLER PARK and big blue the crane, need i say more?

 

Yep Hoan Bridge and the "deep tunnel project" that keeps on pumping turds into the lake

 

I’ve lived in MA and now in CT. MA, man, say your prayers going over any Bridge in Springfield. I lived there 28 years. The South End Bridge that connects Springfield to West Springfield and Agawam is finally being fixed because sections of the curb were falling into the river below. In CT, there’s just something about parking lots here, no one can build a freaken parking lot right. When did it become wrong to build open parking lots for stores, now there’s all these one way directions and everything is curbed off. You drive to the back of the lot and you can’t get out, it’s all boxed in. There’s exit only, enter only, at one store there’s one way out, right in front of it is a triangle shaped island with a stop sign on all three points. What the heck is the use of this triangle median? For the life of me I have no idea what it’s there for except to confuse people and make getting out a PITA!

 

We have a thing called the Zilwalkee Bridge here thats part of I75.

This is a couple mile bridge built to replace a draw bridge. It was millions over budget and more than 2 years over projection.

It was build on a foundation of GM casting sand, several foundries close by. Now they say the soil in contaminated. The ground has to be heated under the bridge in the winter because they worry about frost heave damage. This thing is like 15 stories tall also. There are to areas in the middle that have a several foot drop where the bridge has settled and it is inspected on a weekly basis.
I know people who will not drive over it because they dont think it is safe, and one of them is a mechanical engineer.

Sled...

 

i go over that bridge every other weekend....

____

at one of the HS down here the made the football field 20yds to short and rebilt it and added field turf and made a whole new stadium to the cost of about 3mill

 

Here in Savannah they have a parkway named for Harry S. Truman. Only thing is, it was conceived during his administration and they are not done with it yet. Several years ago they found a Bald Eagle (nice bird) nesting in the area of the proposed parkway route, so along come the environmentalists to stop the build. After another redesign, the new work finally gets approved, and guess wht. The eagle has moved. Years later and millions of dollars down the drain.