Shortly after 1 p.m. on November 4, 1998, commuters got one more reason to detest the decrepit but vital Woodrow Wilson Bridge, which connects Virginia with Maryland south of Washington, D.C.
One Ivin Pointer climbed up the bridge’s center span and pondered whether to jump into the Potomac River 50 feet below. Law enforcement officers closed the bridge and allowed him to weigh the question for almost six hours. Meanwhile, a portion of the 200,000 cars that use the bridge daily backed up for 20 miles in each direction on the Capital Beltway, a 64-mile, eight-lane interstate. At 6:45 p.m., police finally shot Pointer with a beanbag bullet, then plucked him out of the Potomac. (Pointer now sells real estate from an office in Washington’s hip Dupont Circle.)
Because he didn’t use the route, Jim Ruddell, ’77, was not among the gridlocked commuters who wished Pointer dead, cursed, slept, prayed, paced, ran out of gas, abandoned their cars and urinated by the side of the road on that endless afternoon. But Ruddell, an engineering manager and Virginia resident, knew full well that the day’s drama was only the latest in the bridge’s chronicle of misery. What he didn’t imagine then was that he would play a key role in helping to liberate motorists from the bridge’s clutches.
Two years after the Pointer episode, Ruddell assumed the job of construction manager of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Project, a $2.48-billion remake of the span and a chunk of the Beltway that is largely completed, has opened in stages and whose loose ends will be tied up by 2011. Hailed as an engineering marvel, it is too large to view in full from anywhere but an airplane.
Indecisive jumpers aside, the Woodrow Wilson has been working its way to infamy since it opened in 1961.
In the mid-1960s, an unexpected citizens movement squashed the building of a controversial freeway through Washington, meaning that I-95’s north-to-south traffic was forced onto the Beltway and, uh-oh, over the bridge.
On top of that, the Woodrow Wilson was a drawbridge. Traffic was halted an average of 260 times yearly (creating 10-mile backups) to allow tall ships—often high-mast recreation sailboats—to pass under it while drivers trying to get to or from work fumed.
A single overheated car caused chaos because the bridge had no shoulders to permit its driver to get out of the way, or for emergency vehicles to squeeze by.
This all got worse as the Maryland and Virginia suburbs grew and grew. Every year, more commuters left home at 5 a.m. to outfox congestion, only to hit five-mile-long traffic jams.
So it’s not surprising that Ruddell says the task of rebuilding the bridge “scared the heck out of me. I was both thrilled and intimidated. It is hard to really articulate how big this project was.”
The centerpiece, a 1.1-mile-long, 12-lane twin drawbridge—the world’s widest—covers 17 acres, nearly four times the deck area of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. The superstructure required 50,000 tons of concrete. The bridge has a 12-foot-wide pedestrian walkway and is 28 feet higher than the old one to reduce the number of drawbridge openings.
Ruddell was in charge of all aspects of construction—quality control, inspections, contract administration, traffic management, environmental mitigation and scheduling. It was a long to-do list, but Ruddell, who as a teenager in North Carolina built a fully landscaped mini race track on a ping pong table at home, says he’s good at putting pieces together, “solving puzzles.”
However, he immediately sensed that his penchant for “wanting to touch every important decision” would not work because of the project’s scale, so his first move was to increase the size of the construction management team from three to 180. They coordinated scheduling of some 1,600 laborers and 32 construction contractors. To date, crews have performed an estimated 10 million hours of work, all the while maintaining traffic flow across the Potomac.
Ruddell says he felt most challenged by the need to negotiate peace treaties with the four “owners”—the states of Virginia and Maryland, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration. He had to work through decisions about which state was responsible for what tasks, which would pay for what and which state’s specifications for materials would be used. Then came word that Virginia and Maryland do not permit contractors to work on holidays, followed by the news that they observe different holidays. The parties also disagreed on how to measure—metric or English units? (English won.)
“I didn’t expect the degree of diplomacy that was necessary,” Ruddell says, noting that he visibly lost his temper and raised his voice only once in eight years.
John Undeland, public relations director for the project, says Ruddell’s success stems from his calm, thoughtful demeanor and ability to think strategically. “In a sense, he’s like a master conductor, motivating all the musicians to play their very best individually and in coordination with their fellow players,” he adds.
The project has won many accolades, including national engineering management awards for Ruddell. In early May, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the entire endeavor its prestigious Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award.
And at least one tortured commuter is happy despite slowdowns due to construction. Dan Ruefly, a 55-year-old electrical contractor, won the right to help blow up the old bridge in August 2006 after he won a contest that asked commuters to detail the hell they encountered on the Woodrow Wilson. There was the time Ruefly crushed his hip during a crash, then waited in the ambulance for 30 minutes when the drawbridge went up; and the day he clawed his way home during a 1987 snowstorm that turned the bridge into a parking lot and forced hundreds of people to sleep in their cars; and, yes, that 1998 afternoon when Ruefly sat for hours during the Pointer incident saying things he won’t repeat.
His message to Ruddell: “You’ve done a great job! I haven’t had any problems—so far.”
JOYCE GEMPERLEIN is a Maryland-based freelance writer.
