T forced to rebuild 100-year-old bridge
Greenbush span not in compliance
Correction: Because of a reporting error, an article in Friday's City & Region section about a bridge that needed to be replaced as part of the Greenbush commuter rail line project incorrectly reported the bridge's age. The bridge being rebuilt in Scituate is more than 100 years old and is downstream from a three-year-old rail-crossing bridge.
The MBTA will spend $5.2 million to knock down and rebuild a three-year-old bridge in Scituate, the latest expense added to the still-escalating cost of the new Greenbush commuter rail line.
The first bridge did not meet state and federal environmental requirements because, in a big storm, it could push flood levels up another inch in the area, said Jim Eng, project manager for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
The MBTA's board approved the new bridge during yesterday's monthly meeting. The Greenbush project, which was pegged last year at $513 million by T officials, is now budgeted at $532 million.
"This is the last major structure in Greenbush," Eng told MBTA board members, who had asked whether he would be coming back to them to ask for more money for the project. "But I will be back."
Greenbush, a South Shore train line that was shut down in 1959, reopened Oct. 31 after 25 years of legal and neighborhood battles that helped drive up costs. It is expected to attract 4,300 commuters daily within three to five years of its opening. On Wednesday, the line drew about 2,000 round-trip passengers.
Eng said he could not specify how much the first bridge cost to build because it was part of the original overall $252 million contract with Jay Cashman Inc. and Balfour Beatty Construction Inc. He said the contractors were not at fault because they could not calculate the flooding problems in advance, without significantly delaying the project with more engineering. A hydraulic analysis pinpointed the flood problems a year after the bridge was built, in 2006. Since then, he told board members, the project on Country Way in North Scituate has been "engineered to death."
The MBTA board also approved a three-year contract extension yesterday with the private consortium that runs commuter rail, the Massachusetts Bay Railroad Co. The board voted in December to negotiate the contract extension, despite passenger complaints about widespread summer delays on the rails.
The new contract is worth $738 million over three years, an average increase of more than $50 million a year compared with the original five-year contract.
The contract will also increase penalties for late trains and add bonuses for each day that more than 98 percent of trains arrive no more than five minutes late.
Those penalties and incentives are capped at $1.9 million per year.
Noah Bierman can be reached at nbierman@globe.com.
Correction: Because of a reporting error, an article in Friday’s City & Region section about a bridge that needed to be replaced as part of the Greenbush commuter rail line project incorrectly reported the bridge's age. The bridge being rebuilt in Scituate is more than 100 years old and is downstream from a three-year-old rail-crossing bridge.
