For Mike Fox, bridge replacement is main goal

HOOD RIVER — After working on mega projects worldwide, including Chernobyl, replacing the Hood River Bridge doesn’t daunt Mike Fox.

He got his degree in engineering, worked for Bechtel Corporation, the U.S.’ largest engineering and construction firm. They build refineries, LNG plants, airports, and nuclear power plants. He’s seen almost everything in his 45-year career, moving houses maybe 15 times (he’s lost exact count) between projects.

“We’re talking large — $15 billion-plus type projects. So our bridge here is actually pretty small ... But it’s an important bridge.”

At Bechtel, workers had two bosses: the project manager, and a functional manager who “watches out for your career, and makes sure you’re trained” and following procedures. Fox became a worldwide function manager with about 2,400 project control people reporting to him.

Each year, he visited every project — in excess of 100. He’s seen the Middle East so often he’s lost count, from a huge airport in Qatar with a separate terminal just for the Amir, to the scratch-built city of Jubail. He’s been on five nuclear reactor projects and helped write procedures for a new UK agency, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

“In 2014, I actually went around the world three times in one year,” he said. “So the last thing I want to do in retirement is get on an airplane.”

He didn’t plan to end up in local government, but Hood River was talking about replacing a bridge, and he’s still an engineer. He was surprised to the see the 100-year-old structure still standing, and thought he’d get involved.

His great-great-grandfather came to Hood River in 1893 and became a fruit grower, and his childhood spending money came from picking.

He ran for a Port of Hood River seat in 2019, lost, ran again and won in 2021. “I ended up focusing on the bridge because I could just tell that bridge is not serving our region anymore, and it’s very susceptible to an earthquake or a barge strike, or just breaking down because it’s old,” he said.

If a boat hits the bridge, the lift span might twist and stick, blocking traffic and possibly shipping. Fortunately, the lift span is not endangered by being lifted that often: Last year, “the only time we really had to lift it was for a sailboat that was going from White Salmon to Hood River, and we put that bridge at risk for lifting it for that sailboat, which I think is absolutely ridiculous.”

He’s retired from the port, but still volunteers his time to a position on the Bridge Authority, co-chair since its beginning.

It’s a team effort: develop funding strategy, got two major contracts finalized, and got “some real money” from legislatures. “Prior to that, it was a couple million here, million there. You’re never going to get a bridge like this built that way, and the cost will go up faster than you’re getting the money so you’ll never catch up ... We got our first real estimate put together, and it was like $530 million — and by that time we had maybe $5 million — we didn’t have much.”

Then, they found the current bridge wasn’t set on bedrock — it was sitting 60 feet above bedrock, on gravel that could liquefy in an earthquake and dump the whole thing in the river.

One of the biggest challenges is keeping the cost down. At $1.12 billion, with about $160 million in leeway, if the project was delayed, even for a year, costs would rise by $60 million. “Right now, we’re spending about somewhere between a half a million and a million dollars a month working on the bridge, just for design and advocacy,” he noted. Under construction, it’ll cost $10 to $15 million a month, which “doesn’t scare me a bit,” Fox says, after the career he’s had. “In fact, that’s cheap.”

They also chose to work with Salmon Safe, a group of scientists and engineers who work with industry to protect runoff from chemicals and thus protect fish. It’ll be the first Salmon Safe bridge in the entire world.

“We don’t have to do it, but we’re doing it because we live in this area and we don’t want to screw things up,” he said.

Construction begins 2027. Meanwhile, Fox joins meetings between Federal Highways and the four treaty tribes who must be compensated for loss of fishing access during construction — 153 meetings, to date.

The Trump administration’s cutting of jobs earlier in the year slowed things. The remaining people are stretched, doing extra jobs they aren’t trained for, and “there’s nobody home to call,” he said. But nonetheless, “I’m having a lot of fun,” he noted, “and I’m old enough that I don’t really care if I offend people. My absolute goal — the only reason why [I’m involved] — is I want a new bridge for our community. It is absolutely imperative that we get a new bridge. If that old bridge went away, it’d be disastrous for our three local communities.”

The pace of government is slow, he said. “There’s a lot of factions that want to have a say ... but don’t want to pay for it.”

Still, he encourages others to get involved in local government. “It’s very rewarding,” he said, “if you go in with the right attitude ... try and keep an open mind, because there’s no one right answer, and you got to compromise.” He added later, “It’s amazing what can be accomplished.”

Inside a nuclear disaster

In 2008, he visited Chernobyl. Bechtel had a contract to build a sarcophagus over Unit Four, which had exploded, spreading radiation contaminants over the Soviet Union and Europe and evacuating 49,000 people. That was the worst nuclear disaster in history, and the most expensive disaster yet known at $700 billion and dozens of lives lost.

The nuclear reactor had caved in and its fuel melted into a puddle, “screaming hot radiation.”

So they built the sarcophagus nearby, as a concrete dome on rails, then slid it into place.

Automated processes inside, like robotic cranes, handled maintenance and cleanup once the sarcophagus was placed. “So the intent was, once you roll it over the top of it, you can use remote control cranes to pick off various components that were damaged, get them replaced, and start building a more permanent, sealable structure,” he explained.

Helicopter pilots were dropping sand and pipe on the molten fuel to cover it. Firefighters and workers would run up to the damaged sector, do a short task then run back to safety; radiation doses were extremely high, severely limiting their work, he said. Many of the pilots are now dead.

Bechtel asked him to lead a small team of engineers on a due diligence study, to determine whether Bechtel should accept taking over another company’s separate clean-up of damaged, spent fuel.

That involved collecting the fuel, “drying it out, packaging it, and then put it into casks and storing it on site for long term storage” — all done with remotely controlled equipment.

“So the company that was doing that was having some trouble, and the World Bank and the Ukraine Government wanted to take it away from this company, and give it to Bechtel to go do. So I was asked to lead a small group of people to go in and evaluate it. Should we take it over, or should we not? What’s the risk and what’s the likelihood of success?”

So Fox and his interpreter rode a railroad car through the 20-mile exclusion zone on a hot day. As the car began to move, passengers leaped up and slammed all the windows. “And I’m going to my translator, said, ‘Why are they doing that?’ He said, ‘It’s not a problem.’” Fox insisted and learned it was to keep radiation dust from getting sucked into the railroad car.

Then he looked down. And saw the railroad tracks rushing by, through an open joint between the wall and floor of the rail car! “I said, Well, how about that? She says, ‘Oh, it’s not a problem.’

“So when it happened, everything got froze. So there’s cranes with form work, trying to get set up to make concrete pours. And they just stopped, froze. And today it’s still there,” he said.

With special permission, he went into Pripyat, the city built for Chernobyl workers and evacuated in the disaster. On either side of wide, Russian-style boulevards, he could see apartment buildings five to 10 stories tall, overgrown with shrubs.

“And what was really weird, you could see the windows were open and the curtains were still blowing,” he said. “And there was tricycle kind-of looking rigs, kid’s tricycles, on the sidewalk that were just abandoned and left there. And then ... there’s a kind of a famous one of a Ferris wheel and bumper cars. I stood at the base of both of those.”

He was told not to walk on the grass, over contaminated dirt.

In the end, Bechtel decided not to take over that project as “it was highly automated, a lot of software, and we would have had to take in the source code and really dissect it and basically start over,” he said, and also get required certifications.