In 1996, Jimmy Feazel started a new business as an automation contractor that specialized in facility and equipment automation and programmable logic controllers. Not many contractors in the area were doing this work at the time.

“We’ve always gone toward projects that were different. Projects that not everyone was doing,” said Trey Feazel, Jimmy’s son and current president and director of Feazel Electrical Contracting Inc., Shreveport, La.

Since the ’90s, Feazel Electrical has broadened its business into municipal water treatment and oil and gas facilities. And the company has grown, from four employees to 82 at its largest in 2023. In the summer of 2021, however, Feazel Electrical’s oil and gas customers slowed development.

“We have a bunch of great people, and if this work slowed down, we didn’t want to let them go,” he said. “So the question at that time was, how do we retain these people?”

That was when the Bakowski Bridge of Lights project came up for bid.

“It was something we’d never tried before,” Feazel said, “but I didn’t think it was something a lot of other companies were going to go after either because I expected the logistics to be so difficult.”

Even as the company grew and spanned generations, it never lost touch with its core values of pursuing work that was different and keeping great people together. For Feazel Electrical, the Bakowski Bridge of Lights would be a testament to those traditions.

A bridge thus far

The Long-Allen Bridge, which connects the cities of Shreveport and Bossier across the Red River, was lit with neon lighting in 1993. However, the neon lighting fell into disrepair and was dismantled in 2018. In 2019, local optometrist George Bakowski donated $1 million to the city to purchase new LED lights and relight the bridge. For that generous donation, the city would name its new skyline-defining landmark “the Bakowski Bridge of Lights.”

   

When the project presented itself to Trey Feazel, he told his father.

“He thought I’d lost my mind when I said we were going to go wire a bridge,” Feazel said, but he was adamant about keeping the family aspect of the business intact. “We’re going to continue this to be a family legacy, to be a place where my kids can work, for all these people to work, because we treat it as a family. Without family, the business is nothing but a concept. It’s all about providing for these families and making sure they can all have the best lifestyle possible.”

Lang Mathews, superintendent on the bridge project and now project manager for Feazel Electrical, thought lighting a bridge was a strange proposition, but he was ready to get to work.

“My dad taught me and my siblings to be willing to do what was asked of us whenever it was asked of us,” Mathews said. “I’ve always tried to be loyal, and I can’t imagine working for a better company than Feazel and for better people.”

In the summer of 2021, the city of Shreveport awarded the Bakowski Bridge of Lights project to Feazel Electrical Contracting. The celebration phase was short, however, because the project was scheduled to begin in October and be completed in four months for a planned unveiling and celebration in February 2022.

Cross the bridge when we come to it

Feazel knew logistics would be one of the work’s most demanding aspects, so he invested more time in planning to solve logistical problems before even bidding the project.

“When it came to the bid, I think that’s one place where we made a difference in the pricing,” Feazel said.

   

Two challenges stood out: the lights mounted above the bridge surface and all of the lamps below the bridge that shine down to the water—432 programmable LED fixtures in all.

“The lights above the bridge surface are about 35 feet up, and we could never close the bridge,” Feazel said. “The lamps below are about 80 feet above the water, and the best option we came up with was to put a couple manlifts on a barge.”

Innovative as it may have been, the barge posed significant logistical challenges.

“We had never navigated being on a waterway,” Feazel said. “We had a whole lot of safety stuff to look into. For instance, all of the lifts had to be chained down, but they were motorized, so we had to have the equipment rental company disable the drive functions so they wouldn’t break a chain and drive off into the river if someone hit the wrong controller.”

Moreover, Feazel Electrical’s personnel couldn’t go up in the lifts until the barge was secured to the riverbed, and they couldn’t know exactly what they could reach until they were up on the lift.

“There were a couple times in the relocation process where we had to get really specific in our placement, and we had to anchor the barge, go up in the lift, find out we weren’t in the best spot, come back down, pull the anchors, move the barge, anchor it again and go back up in the lift,” Feazel said. “Luckily, we always got it on the second try.”

Mathews said there were logistical challenges every day, but the key was in finding ways to adjust the workforce when needed.

“One morning, our guy got to the barge and the lift wouldn’t start,” Mathews said. “We had to call the equipment rental company and get them to come out. Obviously, we’re on a barge, so the guys who were supposed to be working under the bridge couldn’t do that, so I had to find them something else to do. We had to manipulate manpower a little bit to keep moving forward.”

There was always something to do, Mathews said. The electrical supply was previously split between Shreveport and Bossier, but with this project, Shreveport took it over. As a result, Feazel Electrical had more than just lights to work on.

“We built a new rack with some new panels and a transformer,” Mathews said. “There also was a lot of repetition, so if we had an issue with the barge, like that day with the lift, I could move those guys up to the roadway and have them fall in with those guys and run conduit, assemble and mount lights, or cut strut.”

   

Working beneath the bridge on the barge was difficult because of logistics, but working above the bridge surface was stressful because Feazel Electrical was responsible for managing traffic, which posed safety considerations for everyone.

“When we had to work with only one lane, it was so tight we could barely get a lift through there,” Feazel said. “We had to think about the safety of our people who were working along the edge of the bridge.”

The constrained space made it difficult for the city’s commuters and for Feazel Electrical. Workers often had to pick up traffic cones that drivers accidentally knocked over, redirect pedestrians walking into the work zones and pick up debris and other items falling off of truck beds.

“We had a guy come through one day, pulling a trailer with stuff hanging off, and he was knocking down almost every cone on the bridge,” Mathews said. “He was super apologetic, but he was by himself. He told us he would come back after he dropped his trailer off and pick up all of the cones, and we really appreciated that even if we couldn’t wait and had to pick them up ourselves.”

   

Except for some cone casualties, Feazel Electrical finished the project without any incidents, and it was all due to good logistics management and planning.

“Since the city required us to give at least seven days’ notice on any traffic changes, we had to continually monitor the progress of the work not only to ensure we stayed on schedule but also to know what we would be doing seven days out,” Feazel said. “We tried to move the barge and change the traffic pattern only once a month, so we had to make decisions that would allow us to work nonstop with all our crews for that whole month.”

One of the structural factors unique to this project was the bridge’s expansion joints.

“Typically, when you run a straight run of conduit, the length is fixed, but a bridge has expansion joints,” Mathews said. “On this bridge, you might get there in the morning and not see a gap, but then by midday, you’d see a gap in there. The drawings didn’t call for expansion couplings in the conduit, but we installed expansion conduits to allot for that movement.”

One final source of anxiety was that the city wouldn’t allow Feazel Electrical to turn on all of the lights for testing until its public unveiling in February 2022. If the electricians didn’t take great care to ensure each light was precisely aimed, the lights wouldn’t function correctly for the opening ceremony when the company’s work would be on display for the whole city to see.

Reaching the other side

Feazel remembers growing up in Shreveport with the bridge’s original neon lighting. Now, the city’s skyline has another identifiable feature, and his company helped put it there.

“I run into people from time to time and mention the bridge, and the feedback is so positive,” Feazel said. “People sometimes recognize us by name as the contractor who did the bridge.”

For Mathews, it’s all about pride in the work and sharing credit.

“I couldn’t have dealt with the logistics if the guys I was working with weren’t willing to do what was asked of them,” Mathews said. “There’s no such thing as a self-made man. The people around us motivate us to be better.”

Jimmy Feazel, who started the company in 1996 and established its core values, reflected on how his son reminded him of one of those values with the Bakowski Bridge of Lights project.

“When Trey came to me and said he was thinking about wiring a bridge, I did think he’d lost his mind because we’d never done anything like that,” said Jimmy Feazel. “But he had it all figured out and got me thinking about how we’re a contractor that does stuff that, at one point, we’d never done before. What if someone had told me we couldn’t wire a gas processing or water treatment plant because we’d never done it before? Now, if anybody says anything about wiring a bridge, we’ve done that.”

As much as Trey Feazel appreciates the boon the Bakowski Bridge of Lights has been for his company, he knows it’s meaningful for his community as an enduring feature in the city’s skyline.

“Anytime you see things going on or the good things that have come to this town, you see the bridge and its lights in the background,” Feazel said. “The bridge is kind of a focal point that ties it all together, and that’s pretty cool.”

Feazel Electrical Contracting Inc.