The 'genius' behind the Lake Champlain Bridge - BurlingtonFreePress.com

ADDISON — When acclaimed bridge engineer Ted Zoli designed the new Lake Champlain Bridge, it was no ordinary job.

Zoli played in the shadow of the old bridge as a boy. As a young man, he traveled over it to visit a girlfriend in Vermont. The span was part of the landscape of his childhood.

"I've driven over that bridge 100 times," he said. "I felt it was a wonderful opportunity to work on a big bridge where I grew up."

Zoli was born in Schroon Lake, N.Y., grew up in the Glens Falls area and went to summer camp at Camp Dudley on the western shores of Lake Champlain in Westport, N.Y. His father and grandfather, both also named Ted Zoli, helped build Interstate 87 through the Adirondacks. Zoli vacationed last week at his mother's place on Lake George. His ties to the area run deep.

Now at age 45, Zoli is a highly regarded bridge architect, based in New York City as the vice president of the Kansas City-based firm HNTB. In 2009, he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, commonly referred to as a "genius award," for "making major technological advances to protect transportation infrastructure in the event of natural and man-made disasters." He was named one of Esquire magazine's "15 best and brightest" in 2010.

He designed the elegantly towered Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge in Boston, the curvy Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge in Nebraska and the wooden Squibb Park Bridge in Brooklyn.

The new Lake Champlain Bridge was the fastest, most-under-the-gun job of them all, Zoli said, noting that some 30 staff members pulled all-nighters to design the bridge.

Zoli's firm, HNTB Corp., had been chosen to study the old bridge in 2007 and come up with plans for repairs and eventual replacement of the span that linked Addison with Crown Point, N.Y.

Eventually came a lot more quickly than expected when an inspection in October 2009 revealed the bridge was too dangerous to drive over. It was abruptly closed. Two months later, it was detonated. Within another six months, a new design was chosen, a contract awarded and construction started on a new bridge. A process that usually takes several years shrunk to a matter of months.

While creating the new bridge almost on the fly, Zoli earned a lot of new fans in northern New York and Vermont — for his engineering skills, but also for his willingness to listen.

"Ted's genius, to me, was his capacity to very quickly understand the issue, to absorb input from laypeople and respond back in language everybody could understand," said Scott Newman, historic preservation officer with the Vermont Agency of Transportation, who described himself as a "huge fan" of Zoli's. "Ted doesn't make it about Ted."

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The sixth option

Within the next few months, the bridge Zoli designed will be open to traffic. It is reminiscent of its predecessor, but with modern touches — sidewalks, bike lanes and design techniques that Zoli said should make it easier to maintain.

The bridge travelers will eventually come to know was not among the five designs Zoli and his team originally presented. That changed one day in December 2009 in Middlebury.

Among the five proposed designs, two were streamlined, unadorned and less expensive. Two that featured spiraling cable towers were more expensive. The fifth was an arch design that echoed the original bridge and was priced between the others.

Newman, the Vermont Agency of Transportation historic preservation officer, liked the arch design for the way it evoked the old bridge. Those who chose the design for the 1929 bridge did themselves proud, Newman said, as the arched truss bridge fit perfectly with the sloping mountain landscape.

It seemed to him, though, there was something not quite complete about the arch design Zoli's firm presented. At a meeting with Zoli in Middlebury on Dec. 11, 2009, Newman broached an idea he and others had been tossing about. What if, he asked Zoli, the arch design was extended below the deck of the bridge?

Newman said he had looked at photos of other bridges with such a design and liked the effect. The question was what would Zoli think.

"I thought to myself there's really a variation of this that's actually a little bit better structurally and I think is more of an echo of the existing bridge," Zoli said.

Zoli appreciated the design of the old bridge, not only because of his childhood familiarity with it. When he went on to study bridge architecture, he said he came to appreciate it as the first example of a new form of truss bridge by designer Charles Spofford that was important architecturally and aesthetically.

"I really think it was the right visual idea," Zoli said of the old bridge. "It gave the whole region an identity."

The day after Newman posed the idea of a modified design, Zoli met with the bridge's Public Advisory Committee at the Ilsley Library in Middlebury, where local representatives would have a chance to offer input on the bridge design. He told the group he was considered a new, sixth option, a modified version of the arch.

Others at the meeting agreed that they liked the arch design but that it was missing something. Zoli started sketching on the back of a notebook.

"Everyone took one look at it, and said, 'That's it, that's the one,'" Zoli said.

After the meeting, Zoli called his team back in New York and told them to flesh out the new design. They worked all night to put it into form, he said.

A day later, a Saturday, the new design was included among the five others in a presentation for a series of public meetings in Ticonderoga, N.Y., where area residents had a chance to vote on their favorite. The new modified arch design was by far the top choice.

Bob Johnston, retired Essex County, N.Y., planner, said it was his notebook Zoli used to rough-sketch the new design. Johnston said he has the sketch, which he had Zoli sign, in a frame at home. "I had no idea this ultimately would be the design," Johnston said. Diane Lanpher of Vergennes, vice chairwoman of the Public Advisory Committee, said Zoli was tireless in his willingness to listen to public input and questions about the bridge. "Never once did that man not be enthused at this project," she said. "He never batted an eye at the questions he got."

Zoli said he and his staff were energized by the intensity of local interest in the project. Hundreds showed up at meetings in winter weather, he noted. That doesn't happen on other bridge projects, he said.

"It's like putting gas in the tank in terms of having to work late nights," he said. "That public process in no small way contributed to us making the schedule."

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The floating arch

When the arch for the new bridge was floated up the lake and lifted into place Friday it looked like a tremendous engineering feat. It was actually one of several design facets Zoli's team included to make construction of the bridge easier and quicker.

"That takes all the complicated part out of building an arch on site," Zoli said of building the arch separately. Workers have easier access and the job can be done simultaneous with construction of the other parts of the bridge. The modified arch design made lifting the arch into place easier than it would have been with the other arch design, Zoli said, because its angled approaches provided more clearance.

Zoli is big on finding ways to build a bridge more easily, safely and affordably. When the pedestrian bridge over the Missouri River between Nebraska and Iowa was proposed, bids came in at $47 million. The city of Omaha put the bid back out saying it had only $22 million to spend.

"We built exactly the same bridge for $22 million," Zoli said. He designed the S-shaped curved bridge without any curved pieces, he said, something that made it easier to construct.

The new Lake Champlain Bridge, with criss-crossing cables extending through the arch, borrows a bit of its design from New England covered bridges. Just as a covered bridge gains some of his structural durability from its criss-crossing wooden interior beams, this one will with overlapping diagonal cables, Zoli said.

"It's got some covered bridge DNA," he said.

The bridge's decks and the supporting cables are designed to be replaceable, Zoli said, something that should make maintenance cheaper and less disruptive. The piers have a sloping face designed for ice to ride up the slope and break off rather than hammer at the pier all winter. Granite piers should fare better than concrete, he said. A spray coating on the structural steel is designed to resist corrosion.

Some of those design techniques are the results of lessons learned from the old bridge, which had an innovative design but fatally flawed piers that cracked before their time. That bridge was having pier repair work done within its first 20 years.

Zoli said he expects this one to be relatively maintenance-free for 50 years. With replacement parts it should be running "well beyond" 75 years, he said.

For many of those who've watched the new span take shape over the last year and a half, the bridge is just what they wanted. And so was Zoli.

"It's new. It's clean. It pays respects to the old design," said Karen Hennessy of Crown Point, N.Y., co-chairwoman of the Lake Champlain Bridge Community. "To us, he's a rock star."

Contact Terri Hallenbeck at 651-4887 or thallenbeck@burlingtonfreepress.com.