Engineering Challenge: The Rehabilitation of the Pulaski Skyway Bridge

The 18,498-ft long Pulaski Skyway spans between Newark and Jersey City, in New Jersey. The bridge is comprised of two contiguous structures over the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers. This paper focuses on Contract 6 of the Pulaski Skyway rehabilitation program. This portion crosses the Hackensack River and extends from Span 61on the eastern side of Pier 62 to Span 77 on the western side of Pier 77 for a length of 5,041feet. Arora and Associates, P.C. (Arora) is the prime consultant for this contract. Rehabilitation is underway to extend its service life, mitigate functional deficiencies, and improve overall conditions and safety. The main tasks to achieve the project goals include: modeling and analysis of the structure to assess seismic vulnerability, load rating of all truss elements to identify members that require strengthening to meet current design standards, design of new substructures in the river's spans, structural steel repairs including seismic retrofit, bearing replacement, rocker bent replacement and fender design. Extensive and detailed analyses is required for the design of some of the truss repairs and the replacement of the rocker bents. There commended rehabilitation of the piers provides independent concrete shells around the pier columns to support the superstructure, bypassing the existing columns. The new shells will be supported on drilled shafts, micro piles or combinations thereof, built next to the remaining deep caissons. A new reinforced concrete cap will span over the existing caissons and around the existing columns. A multiple-step Soil-Structure-Interaction (SSI) analysis evaluated the effects of the existing caissons and new foundations on the seismic response. Results showed that the kinematic effects could not be ignored in the analyses and subsequent design of the piers, foundations and rehabilitation of the existing trusses.

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