The National Partnership for Highway Quality (NPHQ) recently presented its 2005 National Achievement Award to the Iowa Department of Transportation and its project partners, HNTB Corporation and Jensen Construction Company, for their engineering and construction of a U.S. Highway 20 Iowa River Bridge in north-central Iowa.

Designed to better move traffic along U.S. Highway 20 in an environmentally sensitive area, the project's innovative design featured the first incrementally "launched" steel bridge in the United States of this kind and magnitude.

The Iowa team chose the unusual technique when they found that numerous site constraints, including limited access for construction equipment and various environmental concerns, precluded more conventional construction. In the field, the project team actually pushed the twin bridges' 10 302-foot spans of structural steel more than 1,500 feet across the river valley. The spans were pushed at a rate of 1 foot per minute across temporary bearings atop the bridges' piers, until reaching the structure's final length of 1,630 feet.

Bob Templeton, executive director of the NPHQ, announced the award winners Sept. 14.

Templeton noted that the unusual setting required "an unusual solution" — incremental launching. "Faced with challenges that were not only structural, the Iowa team responded with aesthetic, innovative, geotechnical, and environmentally sensitive answers," he said. "This project reflected every attribute we look for in presenting the National Achievement Award."

NPHQ is a partnership of federal, state and roadway industry leaders and officials whose advocacy of "customer-centered" practices has produced better, safer, more user-friendly roads and bridges that are completed faster, last longer, and minimize congestion and inconvenience.

NPHQ (www.nphq.org) is composed of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the Texas Transportation Institute, the Foundation for Pavement Preservation, the National Institute for Certification in Engineering Technologies, the American Highway Users Alliance, The Associated General Contractors of America, the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association, Peter Kiewit Sons', Inc., and the URS Corporation.