Preserving a bridge, one paint coat at a time

For months, as cars and trucks whizzed by, a crew of workers has been cleaning and repainting the steel underbelly, sides and railings of the Delaware-bound span of the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

As part of a $6.9 million contract, they've removed spots of rust and applied four coats of polyurethane paint. The top coat is a sea-foam hue of Federal Green that's familiar to anyone who's ridden the twin spans connecting Pennsville, New Jersey, with New Castle.

Painters were finishing up a stretch of sidewalk when U.S. Sen. Tom Carper toured the bridge Friday with bridge staff, engineers and representatives of the International Union of Painters & Allied Trades.

This project is more about bridge preservation, than aesthetics, they explained.

"Often, politicians when they say, 'We need to fix our bridges,' what they're really talking about is painting. They don't realize that," said Jim Brewer, a lobbyist for the painters' union. "But if you apply coatings correctly to protect that structure, it can extend the lifetime of that bridge."

The DRBA can't afford to repaint the entire bridge at once, but each piece of exposed steel is a part of the agency's schedule for repainting at least every 10 years, said Greg Pawlowski, project engineer for the Delaware River & Bay Authority, which maintains and operates the Delaware River crossing.

"The whole point of all this is to protect the bridge from the elements," Pawlowski said.

"If the steel wasn't coated in some fashion, it would rust. We're obligated to keep painting the bridge until it's replaced, which will be long after you and I are dead."

Next up are the bridge's 440-foot-high towers. That project, estimated at $14 million over several years, is likely to involve a scaffold or other framework system to encapsulate the towers and allow for repairs and removing years worth of old paint, including obsolete lead-based formulas that need to be disposed of properly.

All those layers of paint add to the overall structural weight, and can weaken sections of the bridge over time.

"That paint really does have a lot of weight to it," Pawlowski said. "It also gives us a chance to look at the steel underneath it. Some things you just can't see effectively until you take off the paint."

DRBA is also working on designs for a dehumidification system for the bridge's steel cables. The system would regularly send dry air through the cables to push out moisture that can get into the cable wiring and cause corrosion, Pawlowski said.

The current painting contract covered the center and side spans of the Delaware-bound bridge, which, at 46 years old, is the younger of the two spans.

The painting began in spring of 2013 and should wrap up this week, Pawlowski said. The work wasn't constant, as the painters had to break in the winter months (the paint can only be applied in a particular temperature range).

"A lot of [bridge] owners would forgo this step, or forget this step, and let their bridges deteriorate," said Bobby Stathakopoulos, vice president of Allied Painting Inc., the Cherry Hill, New Jersey-based contractor on the job. "Often, they don't have the funds to maintain their bridge."

That's a familiar theme to Carper, who chairs a Senate subcommittee on transportation infrastructure and has worked to find a long-term way to fund transportation projects.

"There's been a reluctance on the part of my colleagues to pay for infrastructure. What we do is borrow money from the general fund of the federal government, and put it in the transportation fund. We've done it repeatedly for the last several years," Carper said. "We've got to find a better way."

Contact Melissa Nann Burke at (302) 324-2329, mburke@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @nannburke.

ABOUT THE BRIDGE

The towers of the Delaware Memorial Bridge stand 440 feet high, carrying I-295 and U.S. 40 over the Delaware River. The first of the twin steel suspension spans opened in 1951, followed by the second span in 1968. The bridge is 3,650 feet long, and sees an average 45,000 vehicles a day – 33.7 million vehicles last year, according to the Delaware River & Bay Authority. Crews are expected to complete a $6.7 million painting job on the southbound structure this week.