Posted on 05/21/2007 2:28:01 PM PDT by SmithL
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced today that the portion of the MacArthur Maze damaged in a spectacular tanker fire last month will be completed Thursday night and the freeway will reopen for the Friday morning commute.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Winning bid was $867,000 (vs. Caltrans estimate of $5,000,000). Incentives: $200,000 per day w/ cap of about $5,000,000.
Contractor was damned smart. The $867,000 was probably asked for up front (or a large portion of it) and that probably covered most of his out of pocket costs.
The same thing happened after the 91 quake when parts of the 5 were closed. I remember the lead contractor getting over $20mm in bonuses. The free market at work!
Do you know what the CalTrans time estimate was for that $5 million estimate?
You're probably thinking of the '94 quake and the Santa Monica (I-10) Freeway that this contractor repaired in a similar fashion. He also repaired a remote section of Interstate 5 that was washed out by a flash flood in 1995, and used rail cars to bridge the gap during construction.
The deadline for the contractor per the contract was June 29. However, that does not mean that Caltrans’ 5 Million dollar estimate was based on that timeframe. When the accident first happened we heard estimates from one month to several months.
I am waiting for the recriminations along the lines of “they did it so fast, Caltrans’ time frame was way to generous, and the incentive payments are excessive, since the contractor did the work in less than half the allotted time.” If the road opens on Friday as planned, I figure this “storyline” should appear in the Chronicle by the middle of June.
As soon as I heard of this disaster, I knew it would be C.C. Meyers that got it done. These guys do this regularly. When I-5 was washed out, they got it up and running using railroad flatbed cars while they rebuilt the overpass.
That storyline will last only until the next big Caltrans in-house production exceeds its final time to completion estimate. Again.
Then it will quietly disappear.
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