Greetings from Bridging Solutions!

This installment of “A Bridge Moment” highlights an aspect of bridge design and construction that is not covered in college engineering schools, but none the less is quite interesting and challenging. We are talking about bridge demolition. Just about every bridge replacement project includes the demolition of an old bridge. As bridge design engineers we don’t give it too much thought during our projects. We usually just reference a standard specification item in the plans and add a bid item to the project manual such as – FDOT Item 110-6 Removal of Existing Structures for us here in Florida. Hollywood action movie producers will sometimes want to include blowing up a bridge in their movie for dramatic effect and the demolition of an old bridge can be a “kill 2 birds with one stone” situation. Watch the video below to see a very cool demolition that took place in Binghamton, New York. The old bridge had lived out its fatigue design life so the 2- girder bridges that carried I-81 and I-17 over the Chenango River needed to come down and this contractor made short work of it.