FALL RIVER — With painting, concrete and steel repair work under the Braga Bridge nearly done, the visible shielding system containing the vast materials and about 100 workers at various stages should start coming down by early summer, state officials said.

But other work, mostly on the upper bridge deck portion of the Route 79/Braga Bridge Improvements Project, still has another year to go.

That, of course, is not music to the ears of exasperated motorists limited by lane closures and travel barriers for the past decade and a half.

“In May of 2017, the Braga will be complete,” said Gerald Bernard, construction engineer for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s District 5 office.

The overall work on the Braga “is now probably 80-85 percent complete overall,” Bernard, joined by Amy Getchell, the project engineer/district operations engineer, said in a Herald News interview last week at the MassDOT satellite office off Water and Anawan streets.

The major concrete and metal work ahead involves replacing the critical expansion joints that allow the bridge decks to move and breathe and they can open and close up to a half a foot with changing weather conditions.

About two-thirds of the 28 expansion joints that traverse the full width of the six-lane bridge have been replaced — those on the high-speed and middle lanes both eastbound and westbound, Bernard and Getchell said.

The remaining upper bridgework, visible to motorists along the reduced-speed two lanes in each direction — and occasionally limited to one lane as will happen again next week — is the joint replacement on the low-speed lanes and shoulders, they said.

2 lanes for another year

The current two-lane configuration will remain until the project is completed.

Other work under the bridge, where work on scaffolding is visible in the middle of the Taunton River, is strengthening of the concrete pier cap, Getchell said. This horizontal concrete block connecting two piers is being rehabbed.

Under a “sounding” process where crews “take a small hammer and strike the concrete to determine limits of repair,” the contractor works under MassDOT supervision, Getchell said.

“If the concrete sounds hollow or breaks away from the structure, the concrete is chipped out to the first row of reinforcing steel and then the cap is patched with new concrete,” Getchell said.

This work determines “areas that may have deteriorated” since the bridge was built in 1966, she said.

There are 26 piers along the bridge’s 1.1-mile expanse. The current work is on Pier 15 and similar repairs were done on Pier 25, as stipulated in the contract. “We do not need to do this work on any of the other piers,” Getchell said.

About 90-95 percent of replacing corroded structural beams and flooring and repainting them has been done. Crews are continuing to divide smaller sections of steel repairs, and then repaint those areas, the two officials said.

What MassDOT estimated earlier in the job to be about 40 tons of steel replacement included work at five reinforcement areas of the bridge. There are five hinged connection areas along the bridge truss.

‘Pin & hanger’ safety reinforcement

In those areas are “pin and hanger” connections that look like a huge bolt attached to steel plates that over time can corrode and, therefore, weaken.

To retain safeguards identified with other bridge failures, the contractor retrofitted a steel boxed reinforcement called “a catcher beam,” Getchell said.

She said the rigid steel structure bolted under the bridge’s pin and hanger parts would keep it essentially in place if it deteriorated and failed.

The catcher beam, acting like “a catcher’s glove,” was part of this contracted design for the five areas, Getchell said. Work on the final two safety prevention structures was completed this past winter.

In the shadows of the looming bridge and nearby redesigned Route 79/138 concrete and steel ramp system that’s being rebuilt before the eyes of city travelers, Bernard said the ramp access to and from the bridge is on schedule for “full and beneficial use” by mid-September this year.

This $220 million project includes an estimated $95 million to $100 million to repair the bridge, the two officials said.

That’s an increase from the $85-88 million contracted before contingencies funds were added in. That brought the overall project from the $197 million into the $220 million range, Bernard said.

No lead paint

The steel repair work, as MassDOT said they expected, revealed considerably more replacement needed after blasting away the old lead paint from the bridge that was painted green.

“There’s no lead paint left on the bridge,” Bernard said, adding that though the side effects can be harmful, lead paint was more durable.

MassDOT contracted a joint-venture partnership of Barletta Heavy Division/O&G to do the separate but related bridge and Route 79 projects simultaneously.

That partnership allowed each of the general contractors to provide back-up depending up on workload, and Barletta has done the lion’s share of the work, a Barletta official said.

The subcontractor for the structural steel work is Aetna Bridge Co. of Warwick, Rhode Island, and Allied Painting Inc. of New Jersey is the subcontractor for the painting.

Between 35,000 and 50,000 gallons of paint is being used to paint the underside of the bridge. That does not include painting of the upper truss portion of the bridge — when the public chose the “Braga Blue” color in a competitive contest — several years ago.

Before talking about their department’s pride in this one of five state “mega-projects” that’s included under the Accelerated Bridge Program with 80 percent federal highway funding, the two MassDOT officials acknowledged the milestone year for the Braga Bridge.

Fifty years ago on April 15 the mile-long bridge spanning the Taunton River between Somerset and Fall River opened to traffic.

Groundbreaking for this mega-project was 3½ years ago, on Sept. 13, 2013.

Old city problems

It’s a loaded question to ask whether there have been big bumps along the way. One way Bernard and Getchell answered it was to call this “an urban system job … in one of the oldest parts of the country.”

One example Getchell gave was during the ramp reconstruction. “We found sewer lines the city didn’t even know existed,” she said.

“It’s the antithesis of virgin construction,” said Bernard, who’s been working for MassDOT for about 30 years.

Barletta’s Howard Goldberg, the contractor’s project manager, compared unforeseen problems to renovating an old house. “You uncover things you don’t anticipate,” Goldberg said in his upstairs office from MassDOT.

“The owners have been very helpful,” he said of state transportation officials, “providing us with information to keep us going and staying on schedule.”

Goldberg said their project hotline has received few phone calls with questions and complaints, and said the public and state and city officials “have been great.”

Light at end of tunnel

“Everybody’s looking forward to finishing up and getting the barriers off the bridge to the way it originally was,” Goldberg said.

Since the Braga Bridge was completed 50 years ago, this is the fourth major contract Bernard could recall.

The earliest was the complete deck replacement completed in 1989 when he was a new engineer with the department. The re-painting of the upper bridge, reconstruction under Government Center and other maintenance work have kept the span under constant change and disruption.

In a little over a year from now, when Bernard said they’d take the barriers off the bridge.

“It will probably be the first time drivers haven’t seen barriers since about 2001.”

Actually, for those with good memories, there was a span from late December 2012 until preparations for this bridge project began in the spring of 2013, that three lanes flowed on each side of the Braga. Three years before that it also opened fully for a brief period, according to Herald News archives.

Bernard said: “It’s a project we’re very proud of — and I’m sure the people of Fall River are going to be happy to see us gone, eventually,” he said, as everyone laughed.

Email Michael Holtzman at mholtzman@heraldnews.com or call 508-676-2573.