A contract wrangle over a highway project gone very sour could cost taxpayers more than $21 million.

An international construction company has won a $21.2 million judgment against the Virginia Department of Transportation for breach of contract in VDOT's U.S. 58 Clarksville Bypass project, completed in 2005.

The company argued that VDOT owed it money for contract delays, losses of productivity, expensive efforts to overcome the delays in the work, problems drilling the foundation shafts and the impacts of the high water.

The bypass contract called for building 11 bridges and 5.5 miles of four-lane divided highway for Route 58 around the Mecklenburg County town.

The project's largest feature -- and the centerpiece of the lawsuit -- was the 4,800-foot-long John W. Tisdale Memorial Bridge, standing 60 feet above the Kerr Reservoir.

AMEC Civil LLC of Fort Myers, Fla., did the work under a $72.5-million contract with VDOT. Begun in 2000, the job was dogged by high water in the reservoir and unexpectedly difficult foundation conditions.

"The design for the project did not take into consideration adequately the actual nature of the rock that this was going to be constructed in," said AMEC attorney Gregory S. Martin in Maitland, Fla.

And, Martin said, while the work was being done in 2003 and 2004, the Kerr Reservoir levels were extraordinarily high for an extraordinarily long time.

"The access roads were flooded out and even if you could get onto the lake to do work, the work was underwater," Martin said. "There was no practical way to get to the work."

Those problems "essentially took a project that was supposed to be done in two and a half years and turned it into a five-year project," Martin said. "In construction, time is money."

AMEC Civil, a subsidiary of the British firm AMEC PLC, had filed 17 claims with VDOT totaling $24.5 million.

In 2006, VDOT offered AMEC $26,515.75 to settle the claims.

The contract work was supposed to be finished by Nov. 1, 2003, but VDOT extended the completion date to Oct. 14, 2004.

AMEC completed the job 586 days after the originally specified completion date and 238 days after the adjusted completion date, VDOT said. The project was opened to traffic on June 9, 2005.

AMEC and VDOT filed notices of appeal in the case in August. The judge signed the final order July 16.

Neither VDOT nor the state attorney general's office would discuss the case in detail.

"We have appealed the judgment to the [state] Court of Appeals," said Tucker Martin, a spokesman for the attorney general's office, "and we will have no further comment on pending litigation."

Rather than overload Mecklenburg Circuit Court, the complicated case was heard by Judge Charles E. Poston, a Norfolk Circuit Court judge, in a two-week trial in Norfolk last winter.

"I cannot conceive . . . that this will not be reviewed by the Supreme Court," Poston said during the trial. "We may be back here doing this all over again."

Contact Peter Bacqué at (804) 649-6813 or pbacque@timesdispatch.com.