Best Laid Schemes
A Really Neat Bridge
But, Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!– Robert Burns, To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough (in extract), 1785
Installation of the final cable support pipes on the Gerald Desmond bridge replacement. Here is a drone video of the project. [PT]
Photo by Scott Varley
The grand plans of our local officials in Long Beach have been foiled by the corona-virus bug. After seven years of construction, at a cost of $1.5 billion, they can’t even hold a proper ribbon-cutting.
The special occasion is the grand opening of the new, yet to be named, Gerald Desmond Bridge replacement. To prevent the spread of COVID-19, a virtual ceremony is planned for the Friday leading into the Labor Day weekend.
Virtual ceremonies, like professional baseball games with recorded fan noises, are Dumb with a capital D. But, perhaps, this is the fitting grand opening of an edifice that was planned and constructed for a world that may never arrive.
Certainly, the new bridge structure, which has the highest vertical clearance of any cable-stayed bridge in the US, is a remarkable engineering achievement. The cable-stayed design also has a signature aesthetic. We have watched it go up over the years; it really is extraordinary.
The two towers rise up to roughly 515 feet above mean sea level, and include 40 cables per tower. The bridge’s linear extent is approximately 8,800 feet. The cable-stayed span alone is 2,000 feet.
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