Project Excellence: Northeast Anthony Henday Drive

For successfully navigating several challenges including pouring a concrete bridge deck during a harsh Canadian winter, the American Concrete Institute presented a Flatiron JV with the 2017 Excellence in Concrete Award for the team’s innovative work on Northeast Anthony Henday Drive in Alberta.

As part of the Capital City Link General Partnership, a Flatiron-Dragados-Aecon-Lafarge JV with AECOM serving as project engineer, Flatiron led the design and construction of the northeast section of a new ring road circling the city of Edmonton. The project, which opened to travelers in October 2016, finished the final link of the first full ring road in Alberta. Moreover, the JV team beat project estimates by three years.

In all, 47 concrete bridge structures were built, along with 27 kilometers of six- and eight-lane divided freeway, nine interchanges, and flyovers, some of which spanned the North Saskatchewan River.

Supplied by RMC Group of Companies, the project required 120,000 cubic meters of concrete to complete the bridges, ranging from single span to six span, as well as utilizing concrete box girders and cast-in-place concrete drilled pier footings in the North Saskatchewan River.

The project team also built a “heated hoarding structure” which surrounded a single span bridge, allowing crews to pour the bridge deck during frigid and windy conditions. It is generally unheard of to cast decks when it is less than 5 degrees Celsius. This innovative solution allowed the project team to avoid a potentially costly one-year delay.

However, that wasn’t the only innovation on the Northeast Anthony Henday project. The team also opened and operated an on-site material-testing lab, independent of the construction process, to ensure the concrete (and other project elements) met or exceeded quality standards.