PennDOT crews to pour final concrete for new Commercial Street Bridge ahead of Parkway East shutdown

As the complete shutdown of the Parkway East is looming next month, PennDOT crews will soon be pouring the final concrete for the new Commercial Street Bridge. 

As the sparks were flying and the welders' arcs sizzling at its base, the green rebar of the new Commercial Street Bridge alongside the Parkway East outside of the Squirrel Hill Tunnel is waiting to be buried in concrete. 

"The last pour will be just over 250 yards of concrete,: said PennDOT Senior Assistant Construction Manager John Myler.

That 250 yards equates to around 250 tons of concrete, arriving in a parade of cement trucks.

"We pump the concrete up to the bridge deck itself and the crews basically move that back and forth across the width of the bridge and then finish the concrete," Myler said.

By Saturday morning, the bridge deck will be in place, curing for a couple of weeks, but complete nonetheless.

"It's definitely a big step forward," Myler said.

At what will be slide points for the big move, crews are now assembling structures for the mechanisms that will actually lift and move the bridge. And there are tests coming for that.

"We will fully lift the bridge up, we'll move it a foot, bridge it back and set it back down, and that'll just verify that everything is working functionally," Myler said.

Meanwhile, on the planned detour routes, crews are patching potholes and will be painting fresh lines.

"We've done extensive upgrades to traffic signals along the way," Myler said. "It gives us the ability to make those adjustable and help get traffic through the site quicker."

Myler said that drivers should not only think ahead about their detour route, but also take a test run sometime over the next couple of weeks.

"Try and run some of those routes that you think you might use," Myler said. "Just so you get comfortable with it and you're not trying to figure out the day of the first closure." 

Myler said that PennDOT is monitoring the detour routes and that he thinks that using Route 28, while it is farther, may prove to be the fastest, but it could change every day.

PennDOT will have real-time live commute times on the Commercial Street Bridge project website so that drivers can check the status of things before they get into their car.