Parsons Brinckerhoff, a Princeton, N.J., engineering firm, was the Grand Award winner in the 2003 Engineering Excellence Award competition, sponsored by the Consulting Engineers Council of New Jersey.
The firm was cited for its design of the new Ocean City-Longport Bridge which spans the Great Egg Harbor Inlet leading to the Atlantic Ocean between the Ocean City barrier island and the southern New Jersey mainland.
The new bridge provides an essential coastal evacuation route of Ocean City in extreme high-tide situations. The design team developed innovative techniques to minimize the amount of work performed in the site's deep and turbulent waters. These included a spliced girder design using post-tensioning of the pier table girders to the pier cap to eliminate falsework towers; the use of large precast concrete tub cofferdams to construct pile caps at the water line; and the use of precast prestressed concrete panels as both the formwork and the bottom half of the structural concrete deck slab. The new bridge opened in July 2002.
