Undisclosed Documents Reveal Flaws in Margaret McDermott Bridge, Preventing Opening
Two years ago in a gushing “interactive” story, The Dallas Morning Newsdescribed the new Margaret McDermott Bridge across the Trinity River downtown as “heavy metal ballet,” saying the city’s second cable-stayed bridge, named for a wealthy Dallas socialite, was “as much art as engineering.”
Maybe more ballet than engineering. In early 2016, barely half a year after elaborate ceremonies celebrating the lifting into place of the final arch, the bridge began to crack up under the stress of high winds. Since then, it has been the focus of a bitter dispute, never disclosed to the City Council, among designers, project engineers, the construction company and members of the city manager’s staff who oversaw the project.
On March 22, 2016, a rod used to adjust one of the cables holding up the bridge’s pedestrian deck cracked when the cable was twisted and vibrated by wind. The next month, on April 13, another rod cracked. On April 30, a third failed.
There are indications that anchors at the feet of the cables also have failed.
Testing to see if the cable rods would be strong enough in high winds, a common occurrence in this locale, was never done before the cables were installed. The cables have since been stiffened with a system of mechanical Band-Aids called dampers.
All of the parties point angry fingers. Nothing is resolved. The pedestrian and bicycle lane held up by the cables, scheduled to open last summer, remains closed behind trespassing signs that threaten arrest for violators.
The warning signs should be familiar to Dallas by now. The city was forced to post similar warnings six years ago at its so-called “whitewater feature,” fake rapids built in the river near downtown, so dangerous it had to be closed the day it opened. Signs are posted at the city’s Buckeye Trail, a paved nature trail falling into the river seven years after construction.
The failure of the Margaret McDermott Bridge is different in two ways. The first is money. The whitewater feature cost $4 million to build and will cost another $2 million to tear out as planned this year. The Margaret McDermott Bridge consists of two fake suspension arches clapped to the sides of a conventional concrete pier-and-beam expressway bridge to create the appearance of a suspension bridge. Those two arches, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, raised the cost of the overall bridge by $115 million, $109.5 million of which was borne by the taxpayers. So, money.
Second is the global visibility and controversial name of the architect. It’s not possible to believe that the Margaret McDermott Bridge in Dallas will not find a prominent place in the international debate on Calatrava’s work. In this case, the recently released documents show that Calatrava consistently urged the city to get the proper testing done and even offered to lend the city money to cover the cost of the tests if the city couldn't manage on its own.
A trove of documents related to the bridge failure suggests a connecting thread. We are, it seems, a city that doesn’t know where it is.
“The overarching theme is trying to be what we’re not,” says Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs. Griggs, who uncovered the bridge failure although the city staff had not disclosed it to the council, blames the city’s serial embarrassments on a kind of insecure pretentiousness typical of its older leadership. He zeroes in on the near-obsession of the city’s wealthy elite with doing something fancy on our unprepossessing riverfront. “We’re not in the state of Colorado,” he says, “and building a whitewater rapids was never going to work.”
But the whitewater feature was the least of it. A decade ago, a coterie of the city’s wealthiest citizens were determined to bring about the installation of as many as half a dozen grand suspension bridges, all by Calatrava, all to be named for rich women, spanning the muddy, humble Trinity River near downtown. The cost of the original vision would have been somewhere north of building an 18-hole golf course on the moon, so the great dream had to be trimmed.