Singer Island Bridge Replacements

The City of Riviera Beach selected Erdman Anthony to provide design and construction phase services for the replacement of six bridges on Island Drive and Grand Bahama Lane in Singer Island’s Palm Beach Isles neighborhood. The bridges remained in the same locations, but they are now wider in order to accommodate foot and bicycle traffic along their shoulders.

The overall project involved designing and constructing bridges, roadway, and sidewalks; upgrading and relocating utilities; permitting; addressing drainage issues; maintaining traffic; and complying with environmental protections such as not disturbing the seagrasses in the waterway.

The existing bridges on Grand Bahama Lane had 17-foot-long bridge decks and were 31 feet wide. They had two travel lanes, one in each direction. The existing bridges on Island Drive had 17-foot-long bridge decks and were 20 feet wide. They had single travel lanes.

The new bridges were built along the same alignment and have new abutments consisting of square 18-inch prestressed-concrete piles with precast-concrete sheet panels and cast-in-place concrete caps. Holes for the piles had to be preformed due to the presence of hard rock relatively close to the channel bed. The bridge decks consist of precast- and prestressed-concrete slab units.

Our firm handled various tasks throughout the project, including bridge design, utilities relocation design, as well as paving, grading, and drainage design. The design phase also involved landscape design and development of a stormwater pollution prevention plan.

During construction, tasks included conducting preconstruction meetings; responding to RFIs from the contractor; reviewing the contractor’s submittals to determine general conformance to the design concept and the construction documents; preparing supplementary drawings to resolve field conditions encountered; and doing intermittent site inspections to spot-check the contractor’s work related to the bridges’ approach slabs, utility installations and relocations, stormwater pollution prevention, and site restoration.

The new bridges have already made their mark in the Palm Beach Isles neighborhood: Traffic has eased, and bicyclists and pedestrians feel more confident traversing wider shoulders.