Replacing the Champ

In 1928, HNTB’s predecessor company designed the original Champ Clark Bridge, spanning the Mississippi River. Nearly 100 years later, when the bridge was functionally obsolete and in poor condition, HNTB returned to the site to design a replacement.

The original five-span truss bridge, named after James Beauchamp Clark, a former Missouri state official, carried U.S. Highway 54 over the river and connected Louisiana, Missouri, with Pittsfield, Illinois. At 20-feet-wide, and without shoulders, the two-lane bridge seemed to have shrunk over the years as the size of vehicles grew. To ensure there was enough room to safely cross the bridge, farmers and truckers with large loads would pull off the road, call local law enforcement and wait for them to arrive. The responding officer or deputy would shut down one lane of the bridge to normal traffic, escort the vehicle across and then reopen the bridge.

“That happened about 20 times a month,” said Keith Killen, PE, project director for the Missouri Department of Transportation.

Worse, the bridge was the bistate community’s connection to the nearest hospital. Traveling to the next closest bridge, 45 minutes away, could present a life-threatening delay.

By 2017, the bridge carried nearly 4,000 vehicles a day. The narrow roadway, high maintenance costs and frequent flooding of the Illinois approach drove the Missouri and Illinois Departments of Transportation to pursue a replacement.

An efficient, value-added design

Because HNTB and Massman had teamed up to deliver on some of this country’s most iconic Mississippi bridges, including the Huey P. Long, Stan Musial, Bill Emerson and U.S. 82 at Greenville, they were able to quickly arrive at a design solution for the Champ Clark Bridge.

“We designed a low-maintenance, straightforward plate girder bridge that more than doubled the traversable width of the previous bridge,” said Hans Hutton, PE, HNTB design manager.

Two 12-foot-wide lanes, with 10-foot-shoulders in each direction, provide ample clearance. And, with the shoulders extending past the bridge onto the east roadway, MoDOT and IDOT received more project than they had expected. It was the first of several value-adds the team brought to the project.

The new bridge includes four river piers, each founded on 11-foot, 6-inch-diameter drilled shafts, with three land piers that incorporate 48-inch-diameter pipe pile foundations and columns.

“The large drilled shafts allowed us to reduce the number of shafts per pier, which saved time and money,” said T.J. Colombatto, Massman project manager.

HNTB worked closely with the U.S. Corps of Engineers on both sides of the river to ensure the bridge design, as well as the temporary construction conditions, met the agency’s no-rise requirement.

“Reducing the number of piers helped us achieve the no-rise conditions,” Hutton said.

The pile foundations for the land piers were not part of MoDOT’s preliminary design, footing foundations were, but the design-build team’s modification saved schedule time and reduced potential flooding risks.