Noisy month ahead as next phase of Healdsburg Memorial Bridge rehabilitation gets underway

It’s going to be loud and the sound waves will travel far.

The next phase of rehabilitation for the Healdsburg Memorial Bridge, set to start Friday, involves pile driving, a noisy endeavor that will pound steel beams more than 100 feet into the bed of the Russian River and send reverberations into surrounding neighborhoods.

“Pile driving has a way of carrying when you are hammering,” Healdsburg Senior Engineer Mario Landeros acknowledged. “It will be heard through a good amount of the town.”

This week, nearby residents said they had been warned to expect the elevated noise levels and seemed resigned to it, if not uneasy, about how intrusive it may be.

“I guess it’s going to be really loud,” said Glenn Wolfe, who lives in a small trailer park on Front Street, across from the bridge.

Wolfe, who is disabled, expects to be home during the day when the work starts as early as 7:30 a.m. and goes up to 5:30 p.m.

“I have sleep apnea. I have a hard time sleeping. I guess it will be interesting,” he said, adding that he accepts that the work is in the name of progress, to upgrade a bridge that has been around since 1921.

The 94-year-old bridge has been closed for a major retrofitting since just after Labor Day weekend, for a $10 million project that includes replacing the center-span pier, bolstering or replacing steel parts, strengthening two large bridge abutments and installing a new deck and sidewalks.

The pile driving, which is scheduled to occur off and on over most of July, is part of building a new, stronger foundation, a center pier replacement that entails driving steel shell piles deep into the riverbed before their hollow tubes are filled with concrete.

On the bridge itself, the 90 decibels produced by the pile driver will sound like being 3 feet away from a gas lawn mower, according to the environmental studies conducted for the project. At 900 feet away, within range of scores of homes and some businesses, the noise will be 75 decibels, the equivalent of “somewhere between a vacuum cleaner at 10 feet (away) and a garbage disposal at 3 feet,” Landeros said.

The Healdsburg Chamber of Commerce was enlisted to spread the news on social media and by visiting adjacent neighborhoods to warn people about the noisy work.

“We’ve tried our darnedest to get the word out. I know there will be people out there who will complain they weren’t told,” Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Carla Howell said. “That type of sound travels pretty far, especially when the air is hot and still.”

She said most people are resigned to the fact that it’s going to be noisy, dusty and inconvenient to have the bridge closed.

“They just want it to be over,” she said, adding that she heard from more than one person that if they had known the impact the project would have on their personal lives, they would not have been in favor of the bridge renovation.

Gary Begley, 57, a retiree who lives on Kennedy Lane across from the bridge, said, “I don’t mind. It’s something that has to be done.”

He said he is an early riser, and the 7:30 a.m start for the pile driving won’t cut into his sleep. Besides, he said, he grew up around a lot of noise in Long Beach from the nearby oil wells.

Landeros said the pile driving itself is expected to go on for 10 days over a four-week period. That’s because there sometimes need to be 72-hour breaks to let the piles settle into the river.

There will be other pauses to weld sections together, or break down and set up from one pile-driving location to the other.

The vintage, steel-truss bridge was in danger of being demolished after it was given a poor safety grade from Caltrans in 1979. But three decades later, the state agency acknowledged the rating system was faulty and the bridge can carry all legal loads.

Preservationists cheered in 2010 when the City Council decided once and for all to fix up the old bridge, reflecting the popularity of the town landmark. Since then, it’s been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Alan Nelson, a site engineer for Cornerstone Structural Engineering involved with the bridge rehabilitation, praised the attention to detail that the main contractor, Granite Construction, is giving to the project.

He said the original Carnegie steel is being replaced with better metallurgy and the bridge will conform to modern, seismic codes.

“It was built before Model T’s and it’s gone though almost 100 years of being hit and banged around,” he said as he stood on the span Tuesday. “The repair job will keep it around for a long time. It’s a neat bridge.”

During the bridge closure, the 8,000 or so vehicles that cross daily have had to use the Highway 101 bridge downstream. Bicyclists and pedestrians still are able to cross the Healdsburg Memorial Bridge during construction. The bridge is scheduled to reopen to all vehicle traffic by Oct. 15.

You can reach Staff Writer?Clark Mason at 521-5214 or clark.mason@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @clarkmas.