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OLYMPIA,
WA – Crooked River Bridge, designed by T.Y. Lin International and located
in Terrebone, Oregon, emerged victorious over 33 competitors to win the
coveted Golden State Award in the Consulting Engineers and Land Surveyors
of California (CELSOC) 2001 Engineering Excellence Awards competition.
The award is given to the top overall project in nine categories.
David
Goodyear, the project chief bridge engineer for T.Y. Lin International,
will accept the award on behalf of the firm at a special awards banquet in
Sacramento, California on Monday, January 22, 2001. The project, which
will be displayed in the state Capitol building during National Engineers
Week, February 18-24, 2001, will go on to compete in the American
Consulting Engineers Council’s national Engineering Excellence Awards
competition.
Four
years in the making from design through construction, Crooked River Bridge
opened to traffic on September 16, 2000. Spanning a dramatic basalt gorge
300 feet above the Crooked River, this is the first major cast-in-place
segmental concrete arch bridge in the United States and “one of ODOT’s
marquee projects of the decade,” according to Mark Hirota, PE, state
bridge engineer for the Oregon Department of Transportation.
The bridge, which is located about 10 miles north of Redmond on
Highway 97, is 535 feet long and 79 feet wide.
The
structure has set a new standard in bridge engineering and construction
and created new possibilities for concrete arches over deep crossings.
Although cable-stayed construction and the use of segmental travelers are
both relatively common, no one had ever thought to combine them before on
an arch bridge design in the United States.
The
unusual engineering solution responded to the complexity of the site,
whose vertical sides precluded traditional formwork.
During construction, 185-foot tall stay towers were erected on both
rims of the gorge, which is 410 feet wide.
Steel cables suspended the segmental travelers as each segment was
cast, moving from the canyon rims toward the center.
When the arch was complete, finally meeting at the center within
one inch of allowed tolerances, the towers and cables were removed.
Founded
in 1954, T.Y. Lin International is an internationally recognized,
multidisciplinary civil and structural engineering firm.
It is committed to providing innovative, cost-effective, easily
constructible designs for the global transportation infrastructure market.
With more than 700 employees working in offices throughout the
United States, Panama, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan, the firm is able
to provide support on projects of varying size and complexity.
Among T.Y. Lin International’s current landmark bridge projects
is the design of the new $1.5 billion seismic-resistant San
Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge East Span in California which, when complete,
will be the longest of its kind in the world.
CELSOC
is a 45-year-old, nonprofit association of consulting engineering and land
surveying firms. As a statewide organization, it is dedicated to enhancing
the consulting engineering and land surveying professions, protecting the
general public, and promoting use of the private sector in the growth and
development of the state of California.
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