Unit 11 Bridge Building Project

This spectacular bridge is 8,981 feet, or 1.7 miles, long. The total weight of the bridge is about 887,000 tons. The two towers stand 726 feet above the water and 500 feet above street level. They weigh

A picture of where exactly the bridge is located can be found in appendix A. Aside from the year it was built, not much else is known about the bridge yet if the legends are consulted

A simple beam bridge that is flat across and supported at the two ends. A longer beam bridge can be held up along the middle by piers standing in the river. The weight of the bridge itself, plus the load that it carries, plus gravity are the downward forces are spread evenly across the length of the bridge. The upwards forces that hold the bridge up come from the piers. The Confederation Bridge in Canada is a famous beam bridge.

When bridges are poorly constructed, they may fail due to load they carry, collision by derailed trains or even by vehicles that lose control leading to catastrophic incidences. However, if bridges are well-constructed, the chances or injury are greatly minimized in the event of an accident. Discussed in the subsections are the requirements of AS 5100 standards in relation to cable-stayed bridges and include design requirements for bridges, bridge aesthetics, bridge functional requirements, bridge component design requirements and bridge construction

The first completed steel bridge was the Eads Bridge, in St. Louis Missouri. Steel was a very new material and was just starting to become commercially available. Steel was a smart choice to use because it is extremely hard and resists rusting. The Eads Bridge was the longest arch bridge in the world, of 510 feet long. St. Louis became a very important city in the midwest and had to really compete with Chicago during the Civil War. After the Civil War, St. Louis started growing in all directions. “.... the city of St. Louis wanted to reestablish its prewar dominance as the economic powerhouse of the midwest” (Ostrow 75). The main reason to build the Eads Bridge was to connect settlers from the East to the lands of the West. At the time there

In the middle of nowhere, in that vast expanse of trees, lies The Bridge. Nobody knows it as any other name. It stretches across the Dead River, just sitting there waiting for someone new to find it. At one time it was driven over constantly, a way of travel for the inhabitants who are crazy enough to live out there. But now it is just there, a giant chunk of metal, rusting away into nothing. Occasionally it is used for things like fishing, or as a

In the late 19th century, the transportation demands of Quebec and other provinces success in transportation like Montreal’s success in railways led to proposals for bridging the St. Lawrence River. Quebec Bridge has a long story behind it, a bridge that was proposed first back in 1852 but it was not complete until 1919. It collapsed two times in this duration once in 1907 killing 75 workers and second time in 1916 killing 13 workers. In this report I will emphasize on the first collapse.

Initially, suspension bridges before 1940 were made of piers, towers, wires, anchorages, and roadways. Piers were the main foundation for the suspension bridges. There usually were two of them, which were made out of cement and were entrenched in ground underneath the body of water that the bridge was spanned across. Towers were built on top of the piers to provide a means of connection for the roadways and wires. Wires were connected to the towers, roadways, and anchorages to provide tension support for the weight of the bridge. The anchorages were large cement platforms that were planted into the ground on either side of the land so that the wires could be connected to it. Lastly, the roadways were the main point of the suspension bridge. They usually were wide enough to provide four lanes of traffic and stretched from one side of the bridge to the other. This was the basic design of the suspension bridges

Pittsburgh is called the City of Bridges because it has 446 of them. The Smithfield Street Bridge is the oldest extant bridges. It was built from 1881 to 1883. It was not the first bridge to built in that spot. The first bridge to built there was Pittsburgh first bridge, a wooden bridge designed by Lewis Wernwag. That bridge was destroyed in the Great Fire. John Roebling’s suspension bridge was built next. The bridge was destroyed a year later due to stability. Then there are the “Three Sisters” bridges. Vernon Covell and his group of engineers plus an architect by the name Stanley Roush designed and built the

Stretching across the San Francisco Bay stands the world famous Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge is located in one of nature’s most beautiful settings, spanning the mile-wide bay from Fort Point in San Francisco to the Marin County Shore. Joseph Strauss, specializing in bridge building, was the leader of the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. The start of construction began on January 5, 1993 and, after four years, was completed on April 27, 1997. The bridge was needed to be built because of the growing population after the California Gold Rush. The bridge was a difficult task for engineers and is now an inspiration. The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the largest suspension bridges and is well known around the world. The Golden Gate

On the 15th October, 1970, during its third year of construction, the Westgate Bridge collapsed killing 35 men. The section of the bridge that collapsed was a 128 meter span that was being worked on at

It is shaped in a way to transfer weight to the towers and anchors with its tension (O'Connor, 1971, p. 372). Cables are made of high strength wires spirally bound to form a rope (O'Connor, 1971, p. 372). Vertical cable suspenders that are fastened to the main cables hang the actual roadway. Stiffening girders and trusses are along the side of the bridge to distribute concentrated loads and help to keep the motion of the bridge at a minimum (Troitsky, 1994, p115).

The bridge has a very well designed ‘sustainability’ concept, relying on upcycled materials to complete the bridge. These upcycled materials consist of the wood, the fishing net, the oil barrels and the plastic shielding for the barrels. These materials can be used for functional roles in the design, such as platforms, floatation, safety lines across hand rails, and so on. The bridge’s sustainability concept can be further supported by the ease of replacing materials, and not throwing them in the bin. The materials such as wood, plastic and pieces of metallic bolts and nuts can be recycled and reused for other purposed such as furniture, storage or completely recycled back into a molten form for the metallic objects.

Because of advancements in today’s technology in construction field, many types of bridges are being constructed depending on the requirement and their suitability for the situations.

bridges: the Vasco da Gama bridge in Lisbon (Portugal) and the Rion-Antirion bridge, near Patras