Hill & Wilkinson General Contractors announced today that it has completed a 5,500-square-foot pedestrian bridge for Southwest Airlines. The bridge connects Southwest’s Headquarters building to its Training Operational Support building and includes an elevator, stairs and an ADA door in its circulation tower. The bridge allows employees to safely travel between the two buildings and from other parking lots while maintaining a secure campus.
“We have a long-standing relationship with Southwest Airlines and are thrilled to have worked with them on this project,” said Paul Driscoll, CEO of Hill & Wilkinson. “Construction of the pedestrian bridge presented a unique set of challenges in that we had to assemble the bridge onsite and erect the sections into place after they were roughly 80 percent complete. Our team overcame a number of issues in coordinating all of the logistics with the City of Dallas, DART and the DGNO Railroad.”
The total length of the bridge is approximately 750 feet. Crews assembled paint booths onsite to provide a controlled environment for the high-performance paint of the steel prior to erection. Due to the logistical challenges of working with limited laydown areas, coordination of crane placement and sequence of bridge sections were key to erect the longest spans, which were approximately 120 feet long and suspended 30 feet in the air. The 112-foot section over Denton Drive was painted in an adjacent parking lot and then lifted by crane to set on a truck bed for final erection. This process required a shutdown of two city streets, two DART rail tracks and one railroad track over the course of three separate weekends.
Southwest Airlines shared, “Hill & Wilkinson was a great partner with Southwest on the Bridge Project, taking the lead to manage construction efforts that were anything but normal. Their planning, patience and focused communication provided the leadership to bring the many entities involved together for the success of the project.”
The architect for the project was BOKA Powell, LLC, and engineering included RWB MEP, L.A. Fuess Structural and Pacheco Koch Civil.
The bridge officially opened on December 1, 2017.
Read the Dallas Business Journal article in full here: