By: Bill Wilson, Editor in Chief
The curved steel girders were clinging to life hours after a fatal accident on Illinois’ I-80/294/94 interchange. All six would eventually meet their demise as crews recovered the body of construction worker Daniel Lopez on Aug. 21.
Lopez was one of several ironworkers installing a section of the viaduct that linked I-80 and I-94. He was working around one of the shoring towers when tragedy struck the site. Crews were placing the last of six 40-ton girders on top of a pair of 25-ft-high piers when the section shifted and collapsed on Lopez, killing him instantly. Two other workers were treated and released from a nearby hospital. The cause of the accident had not yet been determined at press time.
It was an abrupt ending to the weeklong assembly. The crew’s task involved placing the six beams on top of the piers and connecting them with iron bars.
“This is a major project and everybody at [the Illinois Department of Transportation] is very saddened over the loss of life,” Mike Claffey, spokesman for IDOT, told Roads & Bridges.
The interchange ramp is just one of several contracts on the massive $450 million Kingery Highway project located in the western suburbs of Chicago.
Claffey did not know when work would resume on the bridge. However, highway work in the surrounding area did proceed shortly after the accident.
Crews had to take extra precautions to remove the wreckage that killed Lopez, because the 300-ft-long, 91?2-ft-tall beams were still elevated on the southern pier. A crane carrying a worker in a bucket handled the difficult task. The worker, holding a torch on an 8-ft-long pole, took about an hour to cut through the steel so medical personnel could recover the body.
“The steel beams came crashing to the ground,” said Claffey. “[Lopez] was in the middle of it all and before they tried to cut him away they were concerned because you had these big pieces of steel all twisted and it would have been unsafe to go in there and cut away because you didn’t know, that steel could have shifted.”
A wrongful death suit against contractor Dunnet Bay Construction was filed two days after the tragedy. According to Claffey, IDOT never had any problems with Dunnet prior to the accident. Due to the lawsuit he could not go into specific details on when IDOT conducted a safety inspection at the scene.
“Safety is our No. 1 priority,” said Claffey. “It’s one of our guiding principles.”
When work will continue on the ramp is unclear. Claffey said all six beams need to be refabricated by Industrial Steel Construction.