WINONA — The Minnesota Department of Transportation won a trio of awards for its new bridges crossing the Mississippi River in Southeast Minnesota.
The American Segmental Bridge Institute named both the Interstate 90 Dresbach Bridge and the new Highway 43 Winona Bridge as winners of their 2017 ASBI Bridge Award of Excellence awards. The Winona-area bridges were two of the eight recipients for segmental bridges designed and built in Canada, Mexico and the United States, according to the ASBI.
The organization praised the Dresbach Bridge for its beauty and efficiency while being build across a sensitive environmental area and in harsh winter conditions. "This bridge's structural elements provide aesthetically pleasing shapes and forms with the capacity to deliver a record setting concrete span over a major waterway for its owner," the selection committee noted. "It is a world class Mississippi River crossing bridge."
In reviewing the new Winona Bridge, the committee noted, "This project demonstrated how combining concrete segmental bridge design with innovative project delivery can result in reduced construction costs and time without sacrificing bridge quality and aesthetics." The committee commented positively on the bridge's aesthetic scenic lookouts.
The Winona Bridge also received the 2017 Excellence in Concrete Construction second place award in infrastructure from the American Concrete Institute. And the Dresbach Bridge earned as spot as one of Roads & Bridges Top 10 Bridges from across the country, coming in at No. 9.
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"Each of these projects are the result of hard work from a number of skilled people both on our MnDOT teams as well as our project partners, namely the Figg Bridge Engineers and Ames Construction team who worked on both of them," said Terry Ward, MnDOT project manager who also worked on both projects.
The Dresbach Bridge was completed in November 2016. The new Winona Bridge was completed in August 2016 upriver from the existing Winona Bridge, which is currently undergoing reconstruction and rehabilitation.
MnDOT previously won an ASBI award for the I-35W St. Anthony Falls Bridge in 2009, marking the only other time a MnDOT bridge has won this award, according to a statement from MnDOT.
