

Did Someone Order an Instant Bridge? - moonboots
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/us/rapid-construction-techniques-transform-infrastructure-repair.html?hp

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jtchang
One interesting fact about these drop in construction components is that some
of them are actually being manufactured in China and shipped over here:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8602786...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8602786/New-
San-Francisco-bridge-built-in-China-to-be-shipped-to-US.html)

For it to be more economical to build a bridge over in China, stick it on a
boat, and then drop it in place 1000 miles from where it was originally made
is telling of where the construction industry is headed.

~~~
jlangenauer
That's nothing.

A few years ago, I was working doing some of the engineering for a major
alumina refinery upgrade in Australia. One of the major parts of an alumina
refinery is what's called a calciner, which heats the produced alumina to
drive off the chemically-bound water from the product. They're complex piece
of plant with large ducts, blowers and cyclones all laid out with insulating
material to protect against the high temperatures and erosive nature of the
alumina.

We built our calciners in Thailand as entire modules - not merely the size of
a bridge, but the size of a 6-story building, complete with all equipment,
structure and wiring in place, and then shipped them to the refinery site in
Australia. The largest of the modules was 1800+ tons.

Ah, found a picture: Here's one of our calciners about to be offloaded from
the MV Sea Baron. The crawler crane at the very right of the picture gives a
sense of scale.

[http://www.outotec.com/pages/page.aspx?id=34948&epslangu...](http://www.outotec.com/pages/page.aspx?id=34948&epslanguage=EN)

~~~
Vargas
That's nothing.

The Øresund (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge>) was built
Lego style in Spain, shipped piecewise and assembled on site.

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pygorex
> “The highway department didn’t use to see the drivers as customers,” said
> Frank DePaola, administrator of the highway division for the department.
> “For a while there, the highway department was so focused on construction
> and road projects, it’s almost as if the contractors became their
> customers.”

This is so true in programming as well. It's very easy to be consumed by the
process and neglect the purpose and end-game.

~~~
patio11
_almost as if the contractors became their customers_

Capture of government decisionmaking by suppliers (including external
suppliers and government employees via their unions) is not so much a bug as
it is a feature. (In the sense that it is not an undesirable accidental
property of the system, it was the predictable desired results of actions
taken by someone(s) with decisionmaking authority, not in the sense that it is
socially desirable.)

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ynniv
To the locals this was months of pervasive "future construction" signs warning
us of traffic delays, and then... nothing! Done! I thought that I lost track
of time, when in reality 14 bridges were replaced in 10 weekends. That's like
a half second in "Big Dig" time.

My previous memory of a replaced bridge was the Charter Oak in Hartford, which
was many years of parallel bridges in various states of (con/de)struction.
Science!

------
cek
This is puny compared to...

In Bellevue, WA in 2008 a bridge across I-405 (at NE 8th) was constructed next
to the old bridge, ANOTHER bridge constructed on the opposite side, the old
bridge destroyed, and the first new bridge slid into place creating a new
bridge twice as wide as the old original bridge.

Watch the video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQNfp-Sifhc>

~~~
patrickod
Why was the bridge placed to the right in the first place? Could they not have
placed it in its final position when construction started? (My apologies if
this is a stupid question: non civil engineer here)

~~~
ars
A guess only:

The bridge on the left used to be a two way bridge.

They could not construct the bridge right next to it since they would have had
to close the original bridge (since it was so close to the new construction).

So the built it off to the side. Once it was built they opened it to traffic
(temporarily) presumably to get a head start on converting the nearby roads to
match the new traffic flow (which they would need to do anyway).

Then they slid it into place and the new traffic pattern is already set up.
They actually could have left it off to the side but that wouldn't match the
existing roads as well (too many turns).

~~~
evoxed
Close, but I believe both of the bridges in the video are new. Both new ones
could be constructed on either side of the old, the old destroyed (semi-
surgical demolition, actually much easier without closures if both of the new
bridges had been built), and the new one moved in once everything where the
old bridge was was ready. There's a lot of information online about the
project budgets, proposal, and general construction but I wasn't able to get
any specifics from either the DOT or the structural engineers' site to see if
they had anything to say about it.

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SoftwareMaven
Utah has been rebuilding the largest section of interstate ever for the last
couple years. They've built and moved many of the bridges this way (including
the longest ever in the western hemisphere). Ten years ago, they rebuilt
another section of I-15 for the Olympic games. The difference in commuting
experience between the two is not even remotely comparable.

It is great to see construction techniques benefiting from technology.

~~~
eco
I lived right next to one of the bridges they replaced on I-80 in Utah. They
were replacing a big stretch of the freeway so they set up a "bridge farm"
where they built seven bridges on stacked cargo containers and got them ready
to go. Then they load a bridge on a massive machine with hundreds of wheels
and basically drive it down the one side of the existing freeway to the site
of the new bridge, drop it into place, secure it, and load up another bridge.
They'd drive each bridge over the bridge they had just put in place basically
building their way as they went. It was amazing how quickly they did it (just
41 days which included driving the bridges into place at 0.5 mph). They did a
different section with four bridges in just 48 hours. I felt they made up for
the terrible I-15 reconstruction for the olympics with how smoothly this I-80
project went (and the I-15 expansion in Davis county which also used this
offsite bridge construction techinque).

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ChuckMcM
That is so cool. I particularly like how it leverages the existing
infrastructure. In some parts of the world 'replace the bridge' is code for
rip it down to the dirt, and then build a new bridge where the old one was.
These guys just cut out the bad bits and put in a new section. Well done.

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RyanMcGreal
They did this in 2010 in Hamilton, Ontario:

"It took just 51 hours to completely replace the Aberdeen Avenue Bridge over
Highway 403 this weekend … 29 hours ahead of schedule! Using conventional
methods, this remarkable feat would have taken up to two years to finish.
Instead, using rapid bridge replacement (RBR) technology, removing the old
structure and replacing it with the new bridge took only 2 days to complete."

[http://www.morrisonhershfield.com/newsroom/Pages/AberdeenBri...](http://www.morrisonhershfield.com/newsroom/Pages/AberdeenBridge%E2%80%9Cswap%E2%80%9Dasuccess!.aspx)

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nhannah
I drove down route 9 twice a day for about a year (in and out of Boston), this
is NOT the norm. The one bridge they were working on then was about this size
and at about twice the height. It had apparently been going on for 5+ years,
Mass DOT is anything BUT efficient(See Big Dig) so I wouldn't really expect
this as the new norm. Also then how would they manage to pay so many people to
stand around all day not working??

------
kijin
> _A reporter asked how the new bridge would be secured to the old
> substructure. "It’s 400 tons," said Walter Heller ... "Nobody’s going to
> pick it up and take it home."_

I don't think the reporter meant "secured" in the sense of preventing theft.
Is a 400-ton bridge heavy enough not to rattle and damage the surrounding
concrete if 18-wheelers repeatedly cross it at high speed? Or flip over if a
train hits it from below?

~~~
Ogre
While I don't think it's what the reporter meant either, at least one bridge
has been stolen before. [http://old.post-
gazette.com/pg/11280/1180364-455.stm#ixzz1a9...](http://old.post-
gazette.com/pg/11280/1180364-455.stm#ixzz1a9neYAw0)

I can't find the weight of that bridge directly, nor how they arrived at the
value estimate, but if I'm reading it correctly, this
(<http://www.steelonthenet.com/commodity_prices.html>) seems to say steel
scrap was going for $428/ton in October 2011, so from the "estimated $100000"
we can guess that it was about 234 tons of steel.

~~~
ars
The value is probably for a constructed bridge (i.e. includes labor), not
scrap.

~~~
Ogre
You're probably right: [http://www.wfmj.com/story/15644204/theives-make-off-
with-ent...](http://www.wfmj.com/story/15644204/theives-make-off-with-entire-
bridge-in-new-castle) seems to be the real source of the $100,000 number, an
engineer estimating the likely replacement cost, not the value of the scrap.

Also this, [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2050015/Brothers-
cha...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2050015/Brothers-charged-
stealing-steel-bridge-haunted-prom-queen.html)

> Two brothers have been charged with stealing a 'haunted' western
> Pennsylvania bridge and selling the 15.5 tons of scrap metal for £3,160.

(I assume being in Pennsylvania they actually got dollars for it)

~~~
kijin
British newspapers tend to convert everything to pounds without citing the
original figure. I find it really annoying since I can never remember the
going exchange rate for GBP.

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ctdonath
I've long wondered why we don't see something similar for roads. Instead of
the long disruptive process of trying to build a permanent structure in place
(and later try to rip that out and put in a new one), make segments which can
be dropped in place and leveled (and re-leveled) with automatic jacks - a
segment breaks, or you need something wider, just pick up a segment and
replace it in minutes.

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joe_the_user
Just FYI, when they say "completed" they mean "put into place". They took more
than a year to build the structure and then put into place over the weekend.

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brianobush
Amazed to see... the clusters of workers standing around.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
What a senseless waste of power! Maybe we can use the spare humans to perform
protein folding calculations while waiting for the bridge to be set.

