Continuing our nine-part Meet the Bridge Builders video series, this week’s episode covers the massive size of the Bridge Project.
Trying to communicate the awesome scope of the project was always an interesting challenge for the Communications team. It’s one thing to say that there are approximately 18 million pounds of structural steel and 75 million pounds of rebar built into the new bridge. But numbers of that magnitude can be difficult for most people to grasp. So, the team got used to equating those numbers to things people could visualize. In this case, that amount of steel is the equivalent of melting down 192 Boeing 747 jumbo jets’ worth of metal.
During the video, when the pile cap for the tower was built, the foreman states that they expect a concrete truck to arrive every 1.6 minutes. About 300 concrete trucks came that night to pour the pile cap. Approximately 300,000 cubic yards of concrete were used in the Bridge Project. An average concrete truck holds 8 to 10 cubic yards of concrete. That’s 30,000 to 37,500 trucks over the span of construction.
A couple of the people in the video speak about the height of the towers. They are 515 feet tall and rival the height of the Washington Monument, which is 555 feet tall. Being on the platform at the top of those towers felt as though you were standing on an open deck hanging off the roof of a 50-story building (see the photo below).
