MARTA Closes Garage; Fires Engineering Staff

MARTA's actions came after the agency's new group of engineers notice warped concrete columns in the three-level garage, the transit authority confirms. "There are no current MARTA employees (on the staff) who were involved in the project," Steen Miles, MARTA's chief media relations officer, tells GlobeSt.com. They have all been terminated.

The Doraville station still has a five-level, 1,100-space garage erected in 1998 and several surface lots. The five-level garage is attached to the faulty garage. A third garage was under construction at the opposite end of the station prior to MARTA's decision to close the defective building.

Demolition will cost $1.3 million, confirms Miles. A temporary 192-space surface parking lot will cost $2 million. No funds are available to replace the 521-car garage with a 1,100-car structure at an estimated hard construction cost of $24 million.

To add insult to injury, MARTA, the ninth largest transit system in North America, can't recover damage costs from the consultants who built the garage. A binding arbitration panel previously ruled in favor of the construction contractor who blamed the damage on a faulty design.

MARTA was the engineer of record. Underground Construction Co. Inc. of Benicia, CA built the garage. Metromont Materials Corp. of Spartanburg, SC provided the pre-cast concrete. Devcon Design Group of Milpitas, CA and San Martin Associates of Miami designed the structure.

The $26 million Doraville station was plagued with construction/design problems even before it opened in late 1992, according to published reports. The platform sank five inches during construction causing MARTA to spend $2.4 million of taxpayer funds to repair the project.

After an ice storm in 1993, engineers found the garage's original joints failed to expand and contract properly during temperature changes. That caused the decks to separate from their support columns. The concrete has been shored up with metal supports and bolts since then.

The Doraville station, next to the General Motors plant, is the final stop on the northeast line. In December 2002, MARTA signed a $266 million contract with Alstom of Hornell, NY to overhaul 238 rail cars. The contract is the largest MARTA has ever awarded for capital improvements, the agency says in a prepared statement.

MARTA estimates it transports an average half million passengers a day on its buses, trains and paratransit vans. MARTA began rail service in 1979 and has 38 rail stations over 48 miles of track.