SEQUIM — Construction crews were busy Thursday morning preparing the second steel truss span section for installation on the western trestle of the Dungeness River Bridge.
The first span section was dropped into place Wednesday.
The $1.53 million construction project at Railroad Bridge Park, 2151 W. Hendrickson Road, is expected to be completed within the next two months.
The Jamestown S’Klallam tribe owns both the park and the bridge, and is funding the project with grants, insurance money and other sources.
Nordland Construction, headquartered in Port Townsend, has been contracted by the tribe to complete the project using design and engineering schematics by Otak of Portland, Ore.
The new 750-foot-trestle replaces a 570-foot-long wooden trestle damaged by a storm in February. The damaged trestle has been demolished and removed.
The bridge itself is undamaged, but traffic over it has been closed since February because the old trestle connecting it to the west bank was unsafe.
That blocked use of a portion of the Olympic Discovery Trail, which will eventually span the North Olympic Peninsula from Port Townsend to LaPush.
The new trestle began arriving last month in prefabricated 60-foot-long, 9-foot-deep sections.
The steel sections are manufactured by Wheeler Lumber LLC — a Minnesota firm that specializes in metal, fiberglass and timber prefabricated bridges — and transported to Sequim on flatbed trucks.
Crews are bolting the sections together to create four 182-foot-long sections. A fifth 22-foot-long section will be placed in the middle.
Once the old trestle was completely removed, crews began driving steel pilings that will support the new trestle into the ground at four locations.
The old trestle previously was propped up in 38 areas by five creosote poles in each location. The depth of the pilings varied from 6 feet to 25 feet.
Contractors finished removing the old creosote-covered poles in October, a task that began in August.
The replacement trestle will allow logs and migrating salmon to pass beneath without hindrance by reducing the number of support beams needed to prop up the walkway.
After the steel pilings were driven, concrete piers were then placed on top of the pilings to hold up the trestle.
A concrete pier beneath the existing Howe Truss bridge will support the new trestle where the two structures connect.
The final phase is to lower a walkway onto the piers with two massive cranes.
Members of the 10-man crew must work together in tightly controlled choreography to lower the spans, Robert Bufford, foreman of Nordland Construction, said while preparing the second truss section Wednesday.
“There is a lot of coordination with the cranes being set up,” he said.
“You take one end and put it on a truck and put the other end on a dolly and travel down” to the river from the staging area, he said.
Mud at the site created by recent rains has not hindered the operation, he said.
Funding for the replacement project came from a state Recreation and Conservation Office Salmon Recovery Funding Board grant.
Several other sources of funding also will be used, including tribal insurance coverage payments, tribal transportation funding, a Bureau of Indian Affairs grant, a state Floodplains by Design grant and a contribution from the Peninsula Trails Coalition.
Additionally, a First Federal Community Foundation grant of $100,000 will fund the re-decking of the Howe truss bridge portion of the crossing.
When the trestle was damaged last February, engineers assessed the older wooden structure. The tribe elected to replace, not fix, the trestle section.
The design and engineering work was funded by a $172,000 grant from the state Salmon Recovery Fund Board.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
