EARTHQUAKE / LIFELINES OF L.A. : THE REBUILDING : Caltrans Chops Down Red Tape to Put Up Concrete : Agency used innovative bidding procedure and worked so fast that some contractors worry if they will be able to get enough materials.

To get Southern California roads and freeways back up to speed quickly after the Northridge quake--a job that will require $800 million in rebuilding and repairs--Caltrans officials did not just trim back on bureaucratic red tape.

They sliced through it.

On the day of the quake, working at times by flashlight in a Downtown office that lost its power, supervisors began approving emergency no-bid contracts to remove damaged bridges and shore up shaky ones.

And in less than three weeks, they issued the first contracts for major reconstruction of the Santa Monica Freeway and fallen stretches of the Golden State Freeway.

Using innovative bidding procedures never tested on such a scale, Caltrans is moving ahead so quickly that some contractors worry whether they will be able to get enough of the steel reinforcing bars and other materials needed to complete the jobs on time.

Contractors who get their work done early will earn bonuses of up to $200,000 a day, giving them every incentive to move as quickly as possible. Every day beyond the deadline will cost them $200,000.

Unlike less urgent contracts, the quake-related ones make no allowance for time lost because of weather.

The combination of high-speed bidding and the incentive-disincentive contracts have brought an unusual level of anxiety and risk to the firms invited to bid.

“Because of the time constraints and not allowing for bad weather days, you’re really playing a game of roulette with the weather,” said Kenneth L. Gibson, executive vice president of the Associated General Contractors of California.

The joke among contractors, Gibson said, is that after bid awards the losers say: “The bad news is I didn’t get the bid,” while the winner responds: “The bad news is I won the bid. Now it’s, oh my God, what do I do now?”

State highway officials say that while accelerating the bureaucratic machinery, they are still insisting on the same standards of workmanship, worker safety and minority hiring that are required under state and federal law for all construction.

Preparing plans for new bridges built to the latest earthquake standards and getting construction started in the shortest time possible has been a remarkable achievement, said Caltrans office engineer P. Kay Griffin.

“I have a group of people here who thrive working under pressure,” said Griffin, who coordinated the bidding procedures for repairing the earthquake damage.

Planning and bidding procedures that usually would have taken six months or longer are being completed in days, she said. Instead of listing and advertising these large jobs to encourage broad competition, Caltrans is inviting small numbers of selected contractors to bid on each.

Instead of giving bidders up to four months to bid a large job, Caltrans gave them only a few days.

Instead of waiting as long as a month between bid openings and the execution of a contract, state officials are opening bids and approving contracts on the same day.

Instead of allowing up to 15 days for contractors to start the job after the bid is awarded, they are expected to begin within 24 hours.

All the major contracts require the bid winners to have crews working around the clock, seven days a week.

And on dozens of smaller jobs--to remove debris, bring down damaged bridges and shore up shaky structures--Caltrans has dispensed with competitive bidding entirely. Department officials are picking contractors to do the work on a standard pay schedule. Some of these no-bid jobs are worth more than $1 million.

Despite the short-circuiting of normal bidding procedures, there has been relatively little grousing among contractors.

That is partly because Caltrans officials have tried to spread the work around among companies that have track records on Caltrans highway projects. They have favored companies that have done extensive work in the Los Angeles area. And they have insisted that prime contractors hire more than the usual number of “disadvantaged business”’ subcontractors--firms run by minorities, women and disabled veterans. Caltrans usually asks that 20% of a job be done by such disadvantaged businesses, but they are asking prime contractors to aim for 40% on the quake jobs.

“We still get criticized,” said Caltrans’ chief bridge engineer, James E. Roberts. “One contractor called because we didn’t invite him to bid on the Santa Monica Freeway. But I told him, we had him down for Gavin Canyon (replacing a fallen section of I-5).”

Roberts outlined the criteria used for the bid invitations. “They had to be large companies doing things in Los Angeles. We had to know they could do things of this size. . . . There are only so many bridge construction people in the state.”

Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee, said that he has heard no complaints about the fairness of bidding. He said he was impressed by Caltrans’ efforts to speed up bidding and still ensure that women- and minority-run businesses get their share of the work.

But Katz promises to watch the results closely. “It’s fine as long as they’re monitoring the quality of work done and as long as there aren’t lots of switches and change orders,” he said.

“I wish they had done it this way in the Bay Area (four years ago),” said Sen. Quentin L. Kopp (I-San Francisco), chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee.

With the responsibility to keep the state’s highways open to traffic, Caltrans officials are experienced in dealing with emergencies--although usually not on the scale of last month’s 6.8 earthquake.

Richard Kermode, who runs the state highway maintenance operation for the Los Angeles region, was asleep at his Glendale home when the quake hit. “As soon as the earthquake hit, I knew it was a large quake with a lot of potential damage to our structures,” he said.

An hour later, he was at the transportation communications center in Downtown Los Angeles. Without power, they worked by flashlight gathering information on highway damage from employees in the field.

“All of our maintenance structure employees have assigned freeways to patrol,” Kermode said. Acting under emergency procedures, without orders from their supervisors, the workers “fanned out and made inspections.”

*

They quickly determined the damage to major structures. Almost as quickly, by about 8 a.m., Kermode began to get calls from experienced contractors ready to begin clearing away rubble and demolishing badly damaged structures. Some were already at the sites of fallen bridges, assessing the damage, when they called in for the job.

By 10:30 a.m., just six hours after the quake, he had approval from Caltrans Director James W. van Loben Sels to authorize the demolition work to begin.

Among the biggest of the non-bid jobs--the removal of a fallen bridge and demolition of weakened structures at the intersection of Interstate 5 and California 14--were awarded to Granite Construction Co. Caltrans estimated the cost of the two jobs at $2.2 million.

Bypassing the usual bidding requirements is frequently done in emergency situations, said W. T. (Doc) Maloney, chief of business management for Caltrans’ Los Angeles district. “We get the full range of problems from earthquakes to slides on the Coast Highway,” Maloney said. “So everything you can think of happening to a road has happened to a road.”

Tearing down a badly damaged highway bridge is a formidable task. Caltrans spokesman Jim Drago described the difficulty of taking down a damaged section of the Golden State Freeway in Gavin Canyon.

“When you detonate one of these (highway bridges), it doesn’t flutter down like a feather,” Drago said. At Gavin Canyon, Caltrans was worried about damaging a buried gas pipeline and a communications line that carried transmissions between area airports. To prevent damage, the contractor had to place 25,000 cubic yards of dirt as a blanket to soften the bridge’s fall.

The demolition jobs require no bidding and present no risk to the contractors. They are paid for time, materials and overhead according to standard Caltrans schedules.

Caltrans is using a relatively new bidding system for the major earthquake work--requiring contractors to bid both total cost and completion time to determine the low bidder. But the method, which includes penalties for firms that fail to get the job done on time, creates great pressures on the competitors.

“Of course it’s nerve-racking,” said Doug Aadland, chief engineer for the E. L. Yeager Co., which won a $14-million contract late last month to replace the damaged bridges on the Golden State at Gavin Canyon in 130 days.

The company has a lengthy track record building freeway bridges and interchanges, including the interchange of California 15 and 91 near Corona. “Normally a job of this magnitude takes at least a month or so to bid,” he said. “We did it in less than a week. We hope they don’t make a habit of this. It’s not an easy process.”

C. C. Meyers Co. won the other big earthquake reconstruction job--rebuilding the Santa Monica Freeway. The company bid $14.9 million to complete the job in just 140 days. The firm’s resume includes work on the Century Freeway and the new upper deck on the Harbor Freeway. Before winning the bid, company Vice President Carl Bauer praised Caltrans’ efforts to speed up the process.

“I’m very impressed with Caltrans’ ability to move forward on this,” he said. “The public, and certainly the politicians, are unaware of the effort that goes into this.”