Feds approve $22 million to protect Delaware Memorial Bridge from tanker collisions

Karl Baker
The News Journal

The federal government will pay half of the $44 million cost to build a floating, concrete fender system to protect the Delaware Memorial Bridge from a collision with an out-of-control ship. 

The Delaware River and Bay Authority, which owns and operates the bridge's twin spans, scored the key $22 million discretionary grant from a U.S. Department of Transportation BUILD program.   

The view of the Delaware River from Delaware Memorial Bridge.

Early conceptual designs for the bridge fenders describe how eight, 80-foot-wide, floating cylinders will be anchored to the riverbed on either side of the suspension bridge towers. They will deflect rogue ships away from the structures or absorb a head-on impact, the DRBA says.

The authority in September awarded a final $1.2 million design contract to the Pennsylvania firm Modjeski and Masters Inc.

The fenders will satisfy a federal mandate to enhance protections on and around critical bridges. The Delaware Memorial Bridge carries Interstate 295, a key New York City to Washington, D.C., artery, which connects the New Jersey Turnpike to I-95.

The floating fenders, which will be complete and installed in 2023, will protect the spans from the world's largest container ships, which today are in greater use following the 2016 opening of an expanded Panama Canal, federal transportation officials say.

"The Delaware River channel lies in the multiple deep ports constituting the Ports of Philadelphia, South Jersey and Wilmington, which is the largest fresh water port complex in the world," officials said in a funding report. 

An artist's rendering shows how concrete disks will protect the Delaware Memorial Bridge against a collision from a ship.

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In early 2017, DRBA officials said the fenders should protect the bridge from collisions with ships weighing up to 156,000 tons, traveling at 7 knots, a speed well below the typical cruising velocity of a container ship in Delaware Bay.   

“This is what our engineers are leaning to," DRBA spokesman James Salmon said last year. "During the design process, they’re going to explore a number of different options. But this is the one that is currently favored.”

Existing steel bridge fenders, which were installed after construction of the spans in the 1950s and 1960s, are outdated and inadequate to protect the bridge from collisions with modern cargo ships, DRBA officials said in a permit application.

A direct impact on those current bumpers by a modern vessel could damage the steel bridge towers but they would not collapse, Salmon said.

In 1969, an oil tanker struck a bridge tower — the only significant ship collision at the twin spans — causing $1 million in damage to the current fender system.

While DRBA officials in 2015 allocated $2.5 million for design of a new fender system, it went unspent due to delays in the permitting process and a long line of other DRBA capital projects taking priority, such as a $34 million repaving project on I-295.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ultimately issued a permit, which will extend to Dec. 31, 2023.

The DRBA will seek construction bids in early 2020, Salmon said this week. 

A cargo ship passes under the Delaware Memorial Bridge twin spans.

In 2001, four barges crashed in the support columns at the Queen Isabella Causeway near South Padre Island, Texas, causing a partial collapse of the span and killing eight people.

A 1,200-foot span of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge across Tampa Bay, Florida, collapsed in 1980 after a 20,000-ton ship struck a bridge support during a thunderstorm. The collapse killed 35 people.

Following that tragedy, Federal Highway Administration officials published a set of recommendations, which included fenders, they say could prevent future collisions.

Although a severe vessel collision is unlikely on the Delaware Memorial Bridge, the agency should not take any risks with a transportation link relied on by drivers throughout the East Coast, Salmon said.

The majority of the funds used to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars of DRBA project costs come from revenues collected by the DRBA at tolls, airports and ferries.

Contact Karl Baker at kbaker@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2329. Follow him on Twitter @kbaker6.