Prestress Services Industries trucks ready to transport beams for one of PSI's many bridge projects around the region. Photo Furnished.
Two recent mammoth highway and bridge projects will hopefully improve traffic flow over the Ohio River between Kentucky’s largest city and southern Indiana. One, between downtown Louisville and Jeffersonville, Indiana, will add a second bridge span for Interstate-65. Another project includes a second bridge, to be built eight miles upstream, that will connect Louisville’s East End (Prospect) and Utica, Indiana. Also, the project will untangle what is derisively known to local commuters as Spaghetti Junction, where interstates 65, 64 and 71 all meet in downtown Louisville.
And right in the thick of all that complex highway work is a Lexington-based company — Prestress Services Industries.
The company bills itself as the largest fabricator of bridge products in the Midwest and a leading fabricator of structural precast and prestressed concrete components. “We’re a bridge-beam prestressed company,” said Barry Barger, vice president of bridge sales for PSI.
PSI is not providing the steel beams that will span the new bridges over the river, as PSI’s forte is concrete — not just any concrete, but prestressed concrete, which includes special reinforcing steel bars inside the beams that are stretched and anchored to compress and resist stress. This eliminates ordinary concrete’s natural tendency to weaken, crack or break under duress.
“We will be providing all of the pre-cast bridges for the Louisville project on all of the approaches to the bridges, known as Spaghetti Junction. We will also provide the deck panels to go over the steel panels that will span the river,” Barger said.
They consist of contracts in excess of $33 million for production and delivery of 80 individual bridge spans and 1,300 concrete deck panels, according to Barger.
“If you’re driving along the interstate and go under an overpass, you may look up and see concrete bridge beams across the bottom. That’s what we supply. We manufacture them in our five plants [including Lexington and Melbourne, Kentucky] and deliver them to job sites. Contractors put them in place and then put a concrete deck on them, which is the road, and that’s what people drive on,” Barger explained.
For PSI, the Ohio River Bridge projects are a good chunk of business but not its largest job commitment. PSI, whose headquarters is on Fountain Drive in Lexington, has produced about 90 percent of the prestressed bridges for Interstate 69 between Indianapolis and Evansville, Indiana. It also produces the vast majority of bridges for highways here in Kentucky.
Barger said that one of his company’s challenges today is beam size.
“When it comes to concrete bridges, everyone wants the beams to be bigger and bigger,” he said. Back in the 1980s, a concrete beam that was 100 feet to 120 feet was considered big; now they are pushing 180 feet. Longer beams mean lower overall cost. It’s less expensive to install one longer beam than three shorter ones. “When you get to that length, you need bigger cranes and a great transportation fleet, which we have. To stay on the cutting edge, you need to make a pretty good investment,” Barger said.
Aside from highway bridges, Prestress Services Industries has a commercial division that does a lot of work on parking structures. A couple of years ago, it produced the components for the new nine-story parking garage at Baptist Health Lexington’s hospital campus, and it is preparing to ship more to the hospital in the near future. PSI does not do any of the parking structure or bridge installation. Erection companies do that work.
Another local project for which PSI built and delivered components was a parking facility for The Lex Apartments along South Broadway in Lexington. The company is also working on parking structures for sites in Cincinnati; Cleveland, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; and Oxford, Mississippi, among other places.
“We have increased the number of parking structures being built. We have a nice growth rate,” said Conn Abnee, vice president of PSI’s commercial division.
Another familiar Lexington landmark that PSI was responsible for is the wall on which the mural of horses and farm pastures is painted at Blue Grass Airport along Versailles Road.
Technology is bringing improvements in the prestress concrete industry, including automation in creating forms for pouring concrete and better concrete mixes, the design of which is critical to maintaining strength and structural integrity. Abnee said another industry challenge for his company is maintaining competitiveness by producing a high level of product.
“You have to be competitive in order to get the job and then to get the repeat business,” he said. “You have to sustain the level of quality. That’s something we work on continuously.”