SAVANNAH — The Talmadge Bridge is in need of a yoga-like stretch, and the Georgia Department of Transportation has chosen the contractor to add as much as 20 feet of clearance beneath the 1,100-foot span.
Peachtree City-based Kiewit Infrastructure South is the lead contractor on a $189 million project that calls for replacing the bridge’s support cables. The cable replacement is to begin in early 2025 and is expected to be completed in 2028. The project is considered a maintenance action but plans are for the new cables to be shorter in order to address calls from the Georgia Ports Authority for an increase in the bridge’s 185-foot clearance, also known as airdraft.
The authority operates the third-busiest port in the United States and currently has two cargo container terminals – and is preparing to build a third – on the upriver side of the span, meaning ships must pass beneath the bridge when arriving and departing the port.
Elevating the Talmadge would allow the largest ships calling today on the East Coast to have access to the Port of Savannah. Raising the roadway as part of cable-replacement maintenance is a first-of-its-kind project and is considered a precursor to replacing the bridge with either a new, 230-foot-tall bridge or a tunnel bored more than 100 feet below the riverbed.
GDOT is studying those alternatives — estimated to cost between $1.1 billion and $2 billion — while moving ahead with the cable replacement and elevation. According to Ports Authority CEO Griff Lynch, raising the existing roadway would postpone the need for another solution for a “long time” as shipping companies add the larger vessels at a slow pace.
Credit: Curtis Compton
Credit: Curtis Compton
Savannah’s North American container market share, now at 11%, is projected to grow as the port doubles its container capacity over the next seven years. Savannah set a record for container traffic in Fiscal Year 2022; Fiscal Year 2023 was the second busiest year in port history.
The Port of Savannah and other ports authority facilities already support 561,000 jobs and contribute $59 billion annually to the state’s gross domestic product, according to a study by the University of Georgia.
The Talmadge Bridge spans the Savannah River and links to a second bridge to connect Georgia with South Carolina. The span has been an iconic part of the downtown Savannah skyline since it opened in 1991.
The Talmadge is a cable-stayed bridge and is designed for the high-tension wire bundles to support the roadway from above rather than underneath. The span is often mistaken for a suspension bridge, where cables connect to load-bearing anchors at each end.
In a presentation to the Ports Authority’s board of directors in December, GDOT Commissioner Russell McMurry described the process of coaxing “more curvature out of the bridge” and showed a graphic depicting a backbend-like stretch of the roadway between the two piers that flank the existing shipping channel.
Currently, the bridge is among the 10 steepest in the United States with a 5.5% grade.
Kiewit has done cable replacements on cable-stay bridges before, including the first span to undergo such maintenance, the Hale Boggs Bridge over the Mississippi River in Louisiana. That project was completed in 2012.
Kiewit’s initial pre-construction contract for the Talmadge Bridge is worth $6.6 million. The contractor will work with project designer Parsons Transportation Group in prepping for the cable replacement.
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