This 340’ foot long pedestrian bridge connects the Museum of Flight buildings and spans East Marginal Way in Seattle.  The bridge “helps to better circulate visitors and also provides an eye catching icon to the industrial area where the museum is located.” May 2009 Modern Steel Construction.  The bridge was erected in 2 sections with minimum clearance between buildings and beneath live high voltage power lines.   Erection and AESS compliant welds were completed in one 20-hour shift in order to accommodate the City of Seattle’s road closure and lighting constraints.  The project was awarded an AISC IDEAS² award recognizing projects for Innovative Design in Engineering and Architecture with Structural Steel.   

Finding ways to decrease schedule was imperative on this mall expansion project that added 6000 tons of structural steel and 4 new sky bridges to the existing mall.  Apex ran two crews and two crawler cranes simultaneously on this project in order to allow other trades to begin their work as quickly as possible.  Ongoing design changes were incorporated seamlessly into the project work flow and schedule. 

This project presented unique challenges because the new structure, a 29 story high rise, was constructed on top of an existing 5-story building, located in downtown Bellevue.  Apex built a tri-pod tower crane base between floors 4/5 that tied into the existing building in order to accommodate the tower crane for the project.  Subsequent erection of the 29 story building required special pedestrian and existing building protection. 

Connecting the existing Harborview building to the new building across 9th Avenue in Downtown Seattle called for 10 stories of skybridges to be erected from the bottom up.  Logistics for crane and street closure called for a different approach and Apex helped re-engineer the process to allow for top down construction of the structure.  After building a temporary work deck, spanning 9th Avenue for pedestrian safety and emergency vehicle access, which also doubled as a work floor, entire floors were pre-fabricated and picked with 6 air hoists and 4 guide cables.  

The new area in Kent was erected by Apex Steel.  An Apex engineered shoring system allowed the crane to move out of the structure as the bowl steel, stadia seating and roof steel were completed in sections.  This allowed other trades to fall into behind us with completed structure.  Apex provided a full package on this project supplying labor to erect the structure as well as to install finish products like stainless steel handrail and sign supports.  

The Overlake hospital expansion was the second construction project in the area using side plate construction.  Seamless scheduling was a must on this project to eliminate the need for a mobile crane to unload the columns.  Apex employed a crew of certified welders on this project to accommodate the full penetration welds at moment connections that side plate engineering creates. 

In lieu of floating a barge onto the green river to erect the bridge in pieces, the girders were pr-fabricated on the ground and set in one day using an 850ton transilift crane.  Apex was able to simulate the bridge conditions with four pairs of 210’ long, 8’ deep girders with a 4’ radius, 2% slope and a 12” camber weighing 325,000lbs in order to allow for pre-fabrication. 

The new pedestrian bridge ties the light rail station to the Sea-Tac parking garage and is part of ongoing construction at the SeaTac airport project.  This 213’ long, 12’ tall, 30’ wide bridge weighing 232,000 lbs was pre-fabricated and moved to site by tractor and steer cars.  The bridge was erected in one piece with one crane. 

Apex erected the steel girders over I-5 in Everett during a 6 hour window when the freeway could be shut down.  Working with two crews and two cranes, Apex erected and completed bolt up of this 10’ deep girder bridge during the overnight work shift. 

Schedule was the driving force behind this project as the customer wanted the building open 6 months earlier than the original schedule had allowed.  Apex worked with Turner to make this happen and subsequently helped plan logistics of two tower cranes on the project that would support the accelerated schedule.  This 300,000 SF office with 2310 pieces of steel was erected in 10 days.  Zoning and an comprehensive erection plan allowed Apex to use two tower cranes simultaneously with no jib or load line interference.  Apex performed many scopes on this site including rebar, miscellaneous and tower crane erection.

750 pre-cast panels

Apex performed reinforcing, mesh, structural, miscellaneous and pre-cast work. Averaged 75 pre-cast panels per day.

2175 pre-cast panels