Freeway Progress? Behind Rubble

Halfway through the massive $1.1-billion improvement job on the Santa Ana Freeway, there is still little sugar in the medicine for rush-hour commuters.

Along the busy route--which provides access to some of the most popular tourist attractions in Orange County--cars snarl during peak hours. And while construction cranes and piles of concrete rubble are evidence of progress along the stretch between the Garden Grove and Riverside freeways, completion of the project is still two years away.

Drivers should find relief with two added lanes for general traffic and two for high-occupancy vehicles by the end of 2000.

The progress is hard for motorists to appreciate because the freeway still looks torn up and decidedly unfinished. But major improvements have been completed, including several new bridges and the rerouting of State College Boulevard. Officials have also completed the acquisition of land around the freeway, which makes the widening possible.

But getting there has not been easy.

“Our goal has been to not endanger the economic vitality of the county,” said Caltrans spokeswoman Rose Orem, noting that the area under construction is one of the main links to Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, Anaheim Convention Center, Crystal Cathedral, Edison Field and the Pond of Anaheim.

Around half of the 40 million tourists who come to Orange County each year visit Anaheim and its attractions. The 9.5-mile stretch of freeway averages 183,000 cars a day.

So transportation officials knew from the start they would have to try to keep traffic flowing as best they could.

“Shutting down the I-5 was never an option,” Orem said. “We always said we would keep the three lanes going in [both directions], and we wouldn’t shut down two consecutive exits.”

To that end, engineers have worked under strict schedules, often around the clock. The challenge has been to build a new freeway while keeping the old one operational. The road is closed when needed from midnight to 5 a.m., and traffic is detoured.

Long days are normal for those working on the most expensive freeway improvement project in Orange County history.

Jeff Shaw, Caltrans senior resident engineer, rented an apartment down the street from project headquarters in Anaheim to be at work at dawn every morning. Among his team’s feats is rerouting State College Boulevard from an overpass to an underpass. The mammoth undertaking required shutting down the boulevard for only 30 days.

“I felt great after that,” Shaw said. “Later, on a Sunday, I bought our staff some steak dinners.”

The challenge will be even greater when work begins on rerouting busy Katella Avenue in April. This time the schedule calls for the job to be done in 15 days. But Shaw knows most commuters don’t have the time to be impressed--they’re too busy trying to get where they’re going. Two more years of work, even to him, seems like a long way to go.

And there has been pain along with progress, especially for some small businesses in the Anaheim area that were hit by both freeway and city street construction.

But proponents of the work say the widening is crucial to meet future traffic demand.

“Whenever you’re going to make improvement of this magnitude, there will be a certain degree of inconvenience,” said Thomas Know, a spokesman for the Orange County Transportation Authority, a partner with Caltrans in the project. “But we know that at the end of the tunnel we’ll have a much better, much more improved roadway.”

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Quick Lane Change

With the Santa Ana Freeway improvement project at its midway point, commuters have become accustomed to crawling through endless construction zones without giving a second thought to the work going on above, beside and below them. At the State College Boulevard interchange, Caltrans crews recently converted a bridge into an underpass in what seemed like the blink of an eye. A look at the monthlong project:

HOW THE JOB WAS DONE

1. Build new northbound I-5 lanes up to, but not under, State College bridge

2. Tear down State College bridge

3. Complete 100-yard gap in new freeway

4. Shift traffic from old to new freeway

5. Remove 30,000-cubic-yard chunk of old freeway

6. Pave and open State College underpass

NEW TECHNIQUE SAVES TIME

The State College underpass was completed in a fraction of the time it normally takes because construction crews built retaining walls from prefabricated concrete instead of poured concrete.

* Concrete wall

Completion time: 3 weeks

1. Remove hillside

2. Build wall, allow concrete to cure

3. Fill in dirt

* Prefabricated wall

Completion time: 3 days

1. Build wall in layers, fill in dirt simultaneously

Steel tie-backs embedded in solid support wall

BEFORE AND AFTER

The improvement project straightens out the S-curve in the freeway, adds an offramp and two onramps at State College Boulevard and realigns Chapman Avenue.

BY COMPARISON

How construction altered the look of the State College Boulevard interchange.

New State College underpass, 700 feet long

Source: Jeff Shaw, Caltrans senior resident engineer

Graphics reporting by BRADY MacDONALD / Los Angeles Times