Deep Foundation Institute
Outstanding Project Award

This competition recognizes the efforts of member firms in designing or constructing deep foundation projects. Consideration is given to ingenuity of design, ingenuity of construction technique, how design meets owners’ needs, and how the design or technique solved geotechnical conditions.

The Kuparuk River Submersible Bridges received a Special Recognition Award in the 2002 DFI Outstanding Awards Program. Previous crossings consisted of gravel roads and large multi-plate steel culverts that were breached annually and allowed to wash out during spring breakup, eliminating road access to the Kuparuk Field for six to eight weeks. The new bridges reduce closure periods to a maximum of one week annually and eliminate the need to annually reconstruct the road, saving more than $3 million yearly. Extreme environmental conditions, design vehicle weights approaching 4 million pounds, impact loading from river ice five feet thick and discontinuous permafrost soil conditions posed interesting and unusual design and construction challenges.