This is a service / maintenance or supply contract in Denver, Colorado. Contact the soliciting agency for additional information.

https://www.denverpost.com/2021/03/08/eisenhower-tunnel-repairs-history/ In 1968, the town of Vail was in its infancy at the base of a small new ski resort. Breckenridge, an old mining town next to another new ski mountain, was still a tiny enclave with dusty streets. Reaching either outpost in Colorado's sparsely populated central mountains often meant a white-knuckled drive on twisty ribbons of road over treacherous passes. Then the tunnels came -- two of them, built in succession at 11,000 feet above sea level and burrowed through a mile and a half of often-resistant granite and other rock. The construction of the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel was a feat of transportation engineering and human toil the likes of which the state had never seen. It took 11 years to build the tunnel's two bores, and their impact has been felt ever since on Colorado's world-renowned ski slopes, in its robust tourism industry and in fast-growing mountain towns near Interstate 70, including Vail and Breckenridge. But as the westbound bore nears 50 years old, the dual tunnels are in need of serious repairs and upgrades. Groundwater leaks through a tunnel liner are causing damage down below, and other needs range from major plumbing and electrical overhauls to new lighting and ventilation system improvements. The growing and costly repair list is now at $150 million and has caught the attention of state lawmakers and Gov. Jared Polis. The Democrat is pushing for an uptick in investment in arguably the single component of the state's highway system that's too big to fail -- and would wreak havoc if it did. That figure is the sum of items tracked in the Colorado Department of Transportation's asset-management system for the tunnels, which are commonly referred to collectively using the Eisenhower name as shorthand. "Not all of it needs to happen next year, but probably over the next five or six years," CDOT's chief engineer, Steve Harelson, told The Denver Post during a recent tour inside, above and below the tunnels. The amount needed to keep CDOT's most important and longest tunnel running dwarfs the nearly $10 million annual repair budget for all 22 tunnels in the state highway system, CDOT says. Lawmakers are still debating how much to set aside, and how soon, as they weigh competing priorities for next year's budget and a potential plan to raise more money for transportation projects across the state. State and local officials alike point to last summer's two-week closure of I-70 through Glenwood Canyon during a wildfire as a harbinger of the even greater disruption that would result if the Eisenhower Tunnel had to close down fully for major repairs, whether because of a system failure or a major vehicle or truck fire. Besides DIA, it's hard to think of a single piece of physical infrastructure that's more important to the state than the Eisenhower-Johnson tunnels," said Sen. Chris Hansen, D-Denver, during a January meeting of the legislature's Joint Budget Committee. ears, she said, and it's built a prioritization plan at the tunnel that she's confident will avert major disruptions. Still, she said, "there is absolutely a risk that if funding is short, we have to shift priorities as some of those items become more urgent." The challenge stands as one among many along I-70, now a traffic-choked corridor with regular weekend rush hours that bedevil travelers coming from or returning to Denver and the Front Range. But some observers haven't lost sight of the tunnel's bigger impact. "Imagine everything you see today, which is 50,000 vehicles a day (through the tunnels) during peak periods, as this gigantic umbilical cord that now supplies an economy that was birthed through that tunnel," said Randy Wheelock, a Clear Creek County commissioner. His ties to the tunnel go back to when he helped dig the westbound bore as a young man, and he says the economic success story of the Colorado mountains "didn't exist -- and it could not have existed -- without this tunnel in place." Tunnel provided key east-west connection When state leaders lobbied the federal government during the 1950s to extend the planned route for I-70 west of Denver, where it was originally set to terminate, they wanted to build a firmer connection between the state's east and west sides. They also sought recognition that the state was worthy of a full east-west route on the new Interstate Highway System -- despite hurdles posed by the mountains. As it was, U.S. 6 over Loveland Pass, a 9.5-mile traverse, was one of the few highway routes available. It was two lanes and had no guard rails. Bad weather meant a dangerous drive. "There were three times during those early years where I ended up spending the night on Loveland Pass," recalled Terry Minger, who took a job as Vail's town manager in 1968, five years before the first tunnel's completion. "You'd have a snow slide come behind you, and you'd wait to get plowed out. You always wanted to have a full tank of gas -- and maybe a little scotch." Key to the pitch of I-70's Colorado supporters, led by Gov. Edwin C. Johnson, was the building of a tunnel beneath the Continental Divide as an alternative to the impossible task of building an interstate-grade highway over it. A tunnel had been discussed for decades, but the idea never took off. The federal government relented in 1957 and added a mountain route to Utah on its map of the larger interstate system championed by then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The feds were committed to paying for roughly 90% of interstate project costs -- and the tunnel's first bore would become the costliest federal-aid project to date. In the end, Eisenhower would serve as the namesake for the westbound bore of what had been called the Straight Creek Tunnel. Johnson's name would go on the eastbound bore, built second. Including the portals, the tunnels are about 1.7 miles long, and the divide crosses them nearly 1,500 feet above the roadways. The project to build the first bore broke ground in 1968. Getting both tunnels built, however, would turn out to be an odyssey of nearly insurmountable engineering and mining challenges that busted budgets by tens of millions of dollars and stretched project timelines. Seven workers died during construction, and dozens more suffered injuries, according to project histories. Early on, the first group of contractors went bankrupt partway through the excavation of the first tunnel after hitting bad rock in the Loveland fault zone. The state hired a new contractor. "They had to come up with a whole different plan to construct it because the way they were doing it initially wasn't working," said Lisa Schoch, CDOT's senior historian and environmental protection specialist. "They got to a certain point where they had to build little tunnels around the big tunnel so that the mountain didn't collapse in on the workers." Those smaller tunnels, called "drifts," were filled with concrete to hold up the mountain around the main bore, which was more than 50 feet tall and shaped like a horseshoe. The eventual vehicle tunnel, with a rectangular shape, would sit below large ventilation ducts delivering fresh air and pulling out exhaust. The tunnel's construction history is full of clever aphorisms, including this one attributed to Tunnel District engineer R.C. Hopper: "We were going by the book, but the damned mountain couldn't read." It also reflected a time of sweeping social change, as a female state engineer, Janet Bonnema, successfully challenged rules barring women from working in the tunnel during construction. Wheelock, now 72, started on the project in 1971, when he was 23. He'd recently arrived in Colorado from Oklahoma, settling in Idaho Springs. At different points, he worked on the mining crew and as a carpenter. "It was a gigantic hole in the ground," he said. "The diesel smoke was thick enough that, depending on how good the ventilation was at any moment, you might see about two light bulbs forward. They had lights strung probably every 50 feet. ... Of course they had huge equipment running underground, but a lot of the work that was done was pretty old-school -- there was a lot of pick and shovel and carrying and hard, heavy labor, working in some pretty cold conditions." CDOT says more than 1,100 people worked in shifts around the clock on the first tunnel. It opened in early 1973 at a final cost of $116.9 million, twice the original budget, but with federal money still paying for most of it. For the first half-dozen years, it carried a lane of traffic in each direction. Crews broke ground on the second bore in 1975 and finished it in late 1979 at a cost of $144.9 million. The two tunnels' cost amounts to $1.2 billion in today's dollars, though experts say they likely would be much costlier to build to modern standards. The Eisenhower Tunnel has eliminated the need to go over Loveland Pass for most drivers, though strict rules still bar trucks carrying hazardous materials from using the tunnel unless the pass is closed -- a rule some industries have pushed to relax in recent years. The tunnel ranks as the highest point in the U.S. interstate system, with the west portal sitting at 11,158 feet above sea level. (The east portal is 146 feet lower.) The Eisenhower long was touted as the highest vehicle tunnel in the world, but it's since fallen down the list. At least four tunnels built in the mountains of China and Peru in the last decade are higher. The highest is the Mila Mountain Tunnel in Tibet, a twin-bore, 3.5-mile tunnel that opened in 2019 at 15,590 feet above sea level. Nearly five decades of wear and tear Just as the building of the Eisenhower Tunnel required ingenuity, CDOT now faces a modern challenge. Forty-eight years after the first tunnel bore opened, some emerging repair needs, including replacement of the leaky main water line beneath the roadway's pavement, likely will require creative solutions. The tunnels are complex to run. In the multi-story portals on both ends of the tunnels, about 40 employees who work shifts at all hours run utilities that include the ventilation systems, a wastewater treatment plant and small electrical substations. The latter power 28 gargantuan intake and exhaust fans. In the control room, which has a mix of modern and Apollo-era equipment, employees monitor live video feeds of the tunnels as well as key points along the I-70 mountain corridor for trouble. A fire crew stands ready to respond to emergencies inside. They've been aided by a $22 million in-tunnel fire suppression system that was installed in 2015, adding sprinklers. The giant fans also can help clear the air quickly during a tunnel fire. But old systems are evident, as are wear and tear. During The Post's tour in late February, Neal Retzer, the tunnel superintendent and resident engineer, pointed out one of three places of particular concern where groundwater is seeping through the porous concrete membrane that lines the tunnel. He stood in the older westbound tunnel's large fresh-air ventilation corridor, as vehicle traffic zoomed below. Pipes are set up on the wall to funnel the water into the drainage system, but at times it pools and freezes in the corridor. Some water flows down into the vehicle tunnels, staining the wall panels. More recently, it's pushed some panels outward by several inches when it freezes behind them. One near-term project on the repair list calls for injecting grout to fill voids in the fractured rock and soil around the tunnel. "There's a lot of planning that goes into it," Retzer said, about this and other projects. "We've actually been doing a lot of this planning waiting for money like (potential state stimulus dollars) to come. So we can kind of hit the ground running." The project also could be scaled larger for a more comprehensive fix. "Sure, I could do these three problem areas for $3 million," he said, "but I could easily spend $20 million trying to seal this whole thing off. ... I'll take what I can get and get the problem areas done." The last few years have brought a cascade of fresh problems, especially in the westbound tunnel and portals, said Retzer and Harelson, CDOT's chief engineer. Though tunnel crews perform preventative inspections every two years, Retzer said, "it just keeps getting exponentially worse." In the west portal, the upper level's ceiling is leaking so badly that several barrels stood ready to collect drips during the upcoming spring melt. Last spring, water reached an electrical room below, shutting out lights out for a week, Retzer said. The tunnel's staff could receive more clarity about project money soon. CDOT's 10-year statewide project priorities plan includes $50 million for the highest-priority Eisenhower Tunnel work, but that's in the unfunded portion -- something the legislature could address in the current session. Also in the mix: Polis' budget proposal to lawmakers included an unspecified amount for projects at the tunnel as part of a $130 million allocation for state roads and bridge projects in his stimulus plan. Some lawmakers are thinking to the future, too -- and wondering if it's time for a third tunnel bore to expand highway capacity or make room for transit options. "None of us could imagine life without it" Leaders of nearby communities are watching the tunnel's repair woes closely. "To Silverthorne, to Summit County -- to every other mountain county along the corridor and around the state -- it's critically important," said Ryan Hyland, the town manager in Silverthorne, just west of the tunnel. "At this point, none of us could imagine life without it." The new accessibility brought surges of visitors, but also new residents. Since 1970, Summit County's full-time resident population has grown to about 31,000, an 11-fold increase. In Eagle County, home to Vail, the population has increased seven-fold, to 55,000. Both figures exclude significant numbers of part-time residents who have bought or rented second homes. Hyland chairs the I-70 Coalition, which pushes for transportation improvements in the corridor on behalf of local governments and business interests. Wheelock, the Clear Creek County commissioner, is vice chair. Decades after the tunnels' construction, the mountain communities have been transformed -- for good and sometimes bad, some say. "I-70 and its inception are both salvation and curse for Vail -- it's a two-way street and a double-edged sword," said Elaine Kelton, who moved there in her early 20s with her first husband, Gerry White, in 1964 to work at the ski resort. They later built the Rams-Horn Lodge. Like many residents, she celebrates the Vail Valley's success, including attracting cultural institutions and world-class health facilities -- while lamenting negatives that include the piercing truck traffic that barrels through town. In many ways, the Eisenhower Tunnel was an old-school project at the end of the old-school era of highway engineering. It got underway just as new environmental impact-review regulations took effect in the 1970s. Those rules would drastically change how CDOT's precursor, the Department of Highways, built major roads, including I-70 west of the tunnel, said Schoch, the CDOT historian. As it extended I-70, the state rechanneled parts of Tenmile Creek in a canyon west of Frisco to avoid creek crossings. On Vail Pass, it bowed to community pressure to use more bridges and other designs to reduce disturbances to wildlife and habitats. It also agreed to a request from Vail leaders, including Minger, the town manager, to build a bike path over the pass along the interstate. Before the Vail Pass plans took shape, however, pressure by environmentalists and community activists defeated another proposed route west from Silverthorne that would have taken I-70 through the Eagle's Nest Wilderness, with a tunnel under the Gore Range. The state finally completed I-70 in 1992, when the final piece was finished through Glenwood Canyon. Crews built three tunnels, dozens of bridges and viaducts, and many retaining walls to run the highway along the canyon wall. "The tunnel was really the transition between the way we used to build projects and then how we started to build projects," Schoch said, adding: "Things like Vail Pass and Glenwood were built differently than projects before then because we had to consider the environment and the context when we were building roads." But they couldn't have been built without the tunnel -- which remains a crucial, if deteriorating, connection to the Front Range. _____________________ Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel Sludge Removal.