Earthquake Ready Burnside Bridge, Portland

Portland has eight vehicle bridges across the Willamette downtown, and Multnomah County doesn’t expect any of them to be usable right after a major Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. The Earthquake Ready Burnside Bridge is the county’s answer for one of them: take down the 1926 bascule bridge and build a crossing that can carry emergency traffic the morning after a magnitude 8-plus event.

It’s the county’s top transportation priority. It’s also stalled. In October 2025 the county pushed construction past its 2028 target with no new start date, citing uncertainty over federal funding.

Project Scope

The existing bridge isn’t a retrofit candidate. The county says it stands on shallow timber piles with lightly reinforced concrete, and the $2.1 million seismic retrofit done in 2002 was never meant for a Cascadia-scale event. In fall 2024 the Multnomah County Board adopted an inverted-Y cable-stayed design, chosen from six finalists after nearly 20,000 public survey responses.

HDR is prime consultant for final design, with Mayer/Reed leading urban design. Burnside Bridge Partners, a joint venture of Stacy and Witbeck, Traylor Bros. and American Bridge, is on board as construction manager/general contractor, so the builders are pricing and sequencing the job while design is still moving. Besides the river, the new span has to clear nine interstate lanes, two railroad tracks and two light rail lines, and it’s being designed to take future Portland Streetcar loads.

The bridge will close outright during construction. A temporary detour bridge was studied and dropped because it would have added about $90 million and two years. Design is targeted to reach 60% by summer 2026.

Why It Matters

The numbers moved the wrong way. When the builder was selected, the project was pegged at $895 million, with work starting in 2026 and an opening in spring 2031. The county now carries $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion for all phases, including a 30% contingency, and points to steel up about 20%, concrete up about 40% and a tighter labor market. A design and construction review found up to $160 million in potential savings.

Available financing is about $740 million. Most of it comes from the county’s vehicle registration fee. State money adds $20 million and Metro’s regional flexible funds another $10 million, while federal dollars total just $7 million so far.

That gap is the whole story right now. Transportation Division Director Jon Henrichsen told OPB the project doesn’t score well against current U.S. DOT grant criteria: “we’re not a particularly good applicant for it.”

So a CM/GC team is sitting on a design it can’t build yet. The Burnside has been the region’s designated emergency lifeline route across the river since the 1990s, and the fault line isn’t waiting on a grant cycle.

Project Team & Details