ANNA MARIA – According to Mayor Dan Murphy, two concrete pier pilings recently fractured and the cause of one of the piling fractures remained unknown at week’s end.
Murphy provided city commissioners with a pier construction update on Thursday, March 28.
“We will have divers on the pier this weekend inspecting the pilings. We had two pilings that failed. One failed because it was hit by a barge and it fractured the piling. The second piling failed during the process of being driven and we don’t really have the root cause of that failure yet. We do have experts looking at it. Was it a faulty piling, was there an obstruction, was there some other event that occurred during the pile driving process that caused that?” the mayor said.
Murphy said both piling failures occurred at the T-end of the pier.
“When we get the divers’ report I’ll be glad to share that and we’ll go from there,” Murphy told the commission.
“There are currently 135 pilings driven in the pier footprint. We have roughly 70 more to go. We expect that effort will be done in the mid-April time frame, assuming fair weather between now and the mid-point in April,” Murphy said.
Another work day lost
The i+iconSoutheast construction crew lost another day’s work due to windy conditions and rough seas on Wednesday, March 27. Prior to that, the mayor and city commission recently denied the construction company’s request to extend its completion deadline by nine days due to previous work days lost for similar weather conditions. City officials said those types of conditions on Tampa Bay should have been anticipated and accounted for when bidding on the project.
