Something similar to this happened back in 1982 in Michigan during the construction of the Zilwaukee Bridge over the Saginaw River. Construction started in 1979 and was supposed to have been finished by 1982. However in August 1982 they were only about 2/3 completed when an accident occurred where supports holding a section of the bridge failed and one end dropped about five feet and another section lifter up three feet making sections eight feet out of alignment. Between firing the general contractor and hiring a new company, figuring out what went wrong and how to salvage as much of the work as possible, if took another six years before the bridge was finally opened to traffic.
Note that we lived and worked in Saginaw when the project was started and it was a big deal because I-75, the main North-South freeway in the state, and as it crosses the Saginaw River it did so via a drawbridge, the only one along the entire length of I-75, which runs from Key West, FL to the Canadian border in Michigan's Upper Peninsula at Sault Saint Marie. Now upstream from this bridge was a couple of General Motors foundries and at least once a day, the bridge had to open to allow a ship called the 'Niagara' to pass (note that for each passage, the bridge had to open twice, for both the upriver and downriver trips}, as it brought sand that was dredged from Saginaw bay and used as casting sand in those two GM foundries. Now this would cause some monumental traffic back-ups particularly if it was on a Friday or before a holiday as thousands of tourists went up to the Northern parts of the state during the summer months and in the fall, especially during hunting season. So the decision was to build a bridge high enough allow the ships to pass. They also had to come-up with a scheme to do this without interfering with the river traffic so that's why the used that pier and truss approach.
Anyway, here are some pictures that I took shortly after the accident:
September 1982 (Minolta XG-M}
September 1982 (Minolta XG-M}
September 1982 (Minolta XG-M}
The real irony in all of this turned out to be a total waste of time and money. You see, a couple of years before they finally finished the bridge, General Motors announced that they closing the two foundries and therefore the drawbridge would no longer have to be opened on a daily basis. After the foundries were shut down, the only time they would have required the old bridge to have been opened would have been to deliver road salt and gravel to the highway department docks, which would have only occurred once or twice a year.
John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
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